The Karsun Solutions DevSecOps team completed a successful architecture to operations rollout of an entire data and content platform, including external data API integrations, enabling its government customer to go live within the challenging deadline of nine months. Combining modern software development and DevSecOps principles with the proprietary GoLean® platform the Karsun Solutions DevOps Practice accelerates digital transformation for government agencies with solutions built on AWS. These highly skilled resources deliver superior solutions and architectures to customers at federal agencies.
About the Customer
GSA provides workplaces by constructing, managing, and preserving government buildings and leasing and managing commercial real estate. GSA’s acquisition solutions offer private sector professional services, equipment, supplies, and IT to government organizations and the military. GSA also promotes management best practices and efficient government operations through the development of governmentwide policies.
The Challenge
The customer required a cost-effective and modern set of tools to ingest, analyze and visualize data and provide a multi-tenanted experience to participating government agencies. The opportunity existed to optimize current processes to improve efficiency and scale to reduce the lag time from data submission to ready for analysis. In addition, there were previous limitations on intuitive and interactive visualizations due to the following challenges:
- Legacy applications with significant customization
- Hosted on-premise with limited ability to scale to the needs of the customer
- Operational support needed workaround due to customization
- Unpatched hardware/software due to compatibility issues
This purpose-driven analytics platform needed modernization to reduce overall maintenance and faster delivery of features with improvement to the customer experience with Human Centered Design (HCD).
The Solution
After conducting a complete analysis of the current state of the application stacks, the Karsun team implemented the three-step solutioning as explained below.
- The solution was architected ground up to provide best-of-breed services and components to maintain flexibility and enable this platform to pivot into an emerging containerization strategy with minimal disruptions. Proven methods and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allowed accelerated and consistent execution to standup environments for development, testing, and production.
- DevSecOps principles and tooling ensured that the CI/CD pipeline provided ample on-demand and integrated testing capabilities.
- All data portal (Drupal 9) configuration management and develop to deploy lifecycle is through CI/CD pipelines. These have a security first approach, including built-in code vulnerability scanning and Git artifacts vulnerability alerting and automated minor version updates to keep build artifacts
- CI/CD is also used to promote all visualizations developed in Python including SonarQube scanning for vulnerabilities.
- We also constantly rebuild the infrastructure to ensure all images are current and deep scanned
- CI/CD is also used to deploy all the API configuration and lambda code.
- The L-ATO was conducted in the record time of 18 weeks from inception, including the application development, data integration, and external data API integration interfaces. Ground-up ‘usability and maintainability first’ as part of the DataOps principles enabled a smooth transition from development to stabilization and predictable operations.
AWS Services | DevSecOps Tools | Test Automation |
| Karsun cloud experts used EC2, S3, RDS, ELB/ALB, Lambda, CDN, Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail, and API Gateway for this solution. | Karsun cloud experts used Jenkins, Ansible playbooks, Artifactory, SonarQube and Terraform for this solution. | Karsun cloud experts used pytest and Jmeter for this solution. |
The Result
Karsun Solutions completed a successful architecture to operations rollout of the entire data and content platform, including external data API integrations to enable the customer to go live within the challenging deadline of nine months, including LATO. The modernization effort yielded the following benefits:
- Reduced operational cost by eliminating manual configuration and promotion
- Through automated CI/CD implementation, reduced the lag time between data submission to data analytics availability from weeks to hours
- Efficiently reduced security vulnerabilities; Turnaround for high and critical security is now accomplished in hours;
- Enabled consistent and rapid builds and deployments for new feature rollouts and bug fixes
About Karsun Solutions
Karsun Solutions modernizes enterprise systems enabling agencies to make the next technological advancement their next opportunity to elevate mission capability. IT solutions from Karsun are tailored to meet agencies’ unique needs and optimize operations. These solutions adapt and stay relevant to current trends while using secure, digital architecture built to last. It is a proven modernization partner whose expertise elevates agency capabilities and ensures every next opportunity is within reach.
