RocketX

Objective

Reduce complexity and costs. Enable rapid development cycles. Ensure team autonomy, without the need for a full-time DevOps role.

Solution

Moving from AWS EKS to ECS Fargate was chosen to simplify the setup and reduce the maintenance cost, given that RocketX does not have a dedicated team to manage the infrastructure. Terraform was used to manage the infrastructure so that everything is documented and the state is managed and shared between the team. Lastly, GitHub actions were implemented to automate the whole process.

All work was delivered as Pull Requests in GitHub repositories.

Infrastructure

First, we imported the existing infrastructure as Terraform resources in its repository to establish a single source of truth for it. We structured infrastructure based on reusable modules, facilitating the reusing of components in multiple environments. Finally, we set up a GitHub Actions CI/CD workflow based on Pull Requests so that updates can be reviewed and applied on GitHub, with OpenID Connect for security.

CI/CD

Next, we migrated container workloads from the AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service, to Fargate; the Elastic Container Service serverless offering. The required infrastructure (Secrets, ECS Cluster and Service, Application Load Balancer etc.) was introduced in the infrastructure repository. The workloads were deployed to ECS then, with a Git SHA tagged Docker image, through a single Pull Request in the application repository including a CI/CD workflow.

Documentation

Last, we wrapped up this project with the documentation needed for the RocketX team to be able to pick up on their own afterward. This included documentation of all internal Terraform modules, workflows for updating infrastructure as well as instructions on debugging running containers on Fargate using exec in the AWS CLI.

Results

The most important result we got was setting the foundation for the existing team to own and manage their infrastructure autonomously. We achieved this by simplifying and documenting the current infrastructure and container setup. Finally, the AWS bill deflated as a result of replacing the redundant complexity of EKS with the simplicity of ECS Fargate.

Open Source

As part of our work with RocketX we reused and published open source code that everyone can use. These include our reusable GitHub Actions workflow for Terraform on AWS, and the Secrets Manager Secret Terraform module, focusing on simplicity and cost tracking on AWS.