Citizant’s DevSecOps engineers used Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methods to integrate Ansible Tower and Ansible Core with the CI/CD pipeline. On AWS GovCloud, the pipeline can automatically spin up a RedHat Enterprise Linux 7/8 Virtual Machine (VM) or Windows Server 2019 virtual machine by executing automated Ansible playbooks without manual intervention. With the Sysdig security platform integrated with the pipeline, we can automatically run our Security Patches Playbook to ensure these environments conform to Standard Baseline Configuration Guidelines. This end-to-end operation takes about seven minutes. Instead of patching a runtime server and creating a snowflake instance, now we can cut maintenance costs and time by applying patches to the image and making it available in the customer’s server marketplace. This automated IaC approach reduced server provisioning time from 34 days to only minutes.
By provisioning the hosting infrastructure automatically with IaC, our DevOps engineers demonstrated the end-to-end running of an enterprise application on the pipeline – from code commit and new VM build to deployment and execution of test cases, including destruction of the newly created VM – in under 22 minutes.