Citizant’s CI/CD pipeline is integrated with Platform as a Service (PaaS) tools – OpenShift 4 with Podman, Kubernetes, and Ansible. This helps reduce costs by lowering server footprint, removing snowflakes servers (reduce technical debt), and mitigating environment drifts. As a data point, we consolidated 3,000 servers to 180 containerized servers. At a cost of roughly $1,500 per server, our container deployment strategy resulted in a potential aggregate savings of more than $4 million.
We have also evaluated the Department of Defense’s Iron Bank for obtaining DevSecOps tool images. We also use the Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit (RHMTA) for generating the container readiness reports for more than 100 applications The RHAMT report allows the project team to be container ready by providing guidance on conforming to “12 Factor App” industry standard. Our pipeline supports container deployment for Spring Boot and JBoss applications using OpenShift. We have performed 12 production container deployments of the IRS Tax Litigation Counsel Automated Tracking System (TLCATS). At least seven other applications are containerized and deployed on OpenShift in non-production clusters. We have enabled logging features by integrating with Splunk for event and stream analysis. We have also implemented side-car container patterns for logging, single sign-on, and the OpenShift template for SiteMinder, a tool for enterprise Web access management.