Bokbasen provides a wide range of services to all parts of Norway’s publishing community.
The company builds and maintains the Den norske Bokdatabasen catalogue containing data about all Norwegian publishers. By making use of this single centralized register, the industry can easily make use of the data – in online stores, bookshops, libraries and schools – instead of spending time gathering it, as is the focus in many other countries.
When e-books entered the market, Bokbasen was quick to build the infrastructure to support them, including a streaming service for audiobooks. AWS partner Basefarm has been hosting and managing operations for Bokbasen in its private cloud since 2012.
In 2017 Bokbasen started utilizing AWS for storing and transcoding of audio files.
In 2018 Bokbasen migrated their public website to AWS.
In 2019, Bokbasen set out on a new mission to digitize books and learning materials, beginning with Digitalelev, a product for management and procurement of digital learning materials in schools, and Allvit, a platform for distribution of textbooks and resources for higher education.
DevOps
DevOps represents a culture shift that integrates the team that authors code, with the team that operates it, forming a single team. Instead of each software release containing many, potentially disruptive changes that are all released at once, teams are encouraged to release small changes, more frequently, thus reducing the impact of change and making it easier to test and release.
Basefarm engages with customers to support their DevOps business and technology transformations.
The customer chose to use a deployment strategy that involved:
- Building a single artifact for all environments
- Release early, release often
- Use a rolling deployment to gradually replace or upgrade services
- Always fix defects by rolling forward to a new release
It was important for Bokbasen that their own DevOps team had the power to deploy consistently to all environments, including production.
Solution
Infrastructure as Code
Utilizing Infrastructure as Code technology (IaC), Basefarm and Bokbasen can automate the deployment of infrastructure, application services and CD/CD pipelines across environments.
HashiCorp Terraform is used to deploy Bokbasen’s infrastructure. Self-service terraform templates are being used to provide quick and easy creation of new pipelines.
Many great IaC modules from the Hashicorp Terraform registry, and from Basefarm, have simplified the transition. The use of IaC ensures a consistent and repeatable method of deploying and managing infrastructure across environments.
Spring Cloud Config and AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store are used to store configuration and keep secrets such as security credentials encrypted and audited.
Deployment Pipelines
Basefarm Professional Services worked with Bokbasen to develop pipelines to build application artifacts and deploy microservices across Bokbasens Test, Stage and Production accounts, integrating with the following main AWS services:
- Lambda
- Fargate
- Batch
- API-Gateway
- Static websites on S3 (utilizing CloudFront CDN)
When a member of the DevOps team commits to selected branch, the pipeline is triggered, which builds artifacts, such as docker images that are part of the service and submits those images to the container registry. The pipeline then deploys the container to the Test environment. A smoke test using RunScope is launched and the results of the test are manually verified by the DevOps team before approving the release to be deployed to stage, where the same smoke test and additionally verification tests are undertaken before approving deployment in Production. DevOps have read-only access to stage and production environments. The pipelines are allowed cross-account deployments assuming IAM roles.
Database schemas are also modified as part of the deployment pipelines using Flyway.
Similar pipelines are created for CI/CD of batch jobs, lambda functions and S3 hosted websites.
CI/CD: Fargate hosted containers
CI/CD: Lambda functions
CI/CD: Batch jobs
CI/CD: Static websites
Products used in DevOps Toolchain:
Deployment
- HashiCorp Terraform
- AWS CodePipeline
- AWS CodeBuild
- AWS CodeDeploy
- AWS ECR
- Flyway
Config
- AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store
- Spring Cloud Config
Monitoring
- Datadog
- io
- AWS CloudWatch
- AWS CloudTrail
Testing
- RunScope
Version control
- GitHub
- AWS CodeCommit
Notifications and Collaboration
- Slack
About Basefarm
Basefarm is a European managed service provider creating market leaders, by integrating key skills of big data, cloud services and information security into a service offering.
The company provides strategic advice, architecture and implementation together with the management and operation of solutions to several different cloud platforms.
The company provides strategic advice, architecture and implementation together with the management and operation of solutions to several different cloud platforms.
The business was founded in 2000 in the Nordic countries and today there are 550 leading engineers and advisors working in Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.
Basefarm was ranked highest in Whitelane’s IT Outsourcing study Nordics 2018 and was approved by Gartner as cool vendor supplier at the European Cloud Computing Market 2015 for our unique methodology in application operations.
In August 2018, Basefarm was acquired by Orange Group and is now an Orange Business Service subsidiary.
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