The Challenge: Automating deployments at a national scale

With its customer base rapidly growing, High Lander needed to streamline its deployment processes for fast and efficient scaling. Since the company had been executing deployments manually, this approach was beginning to create operational bottlenecks that required solving through automation and infrastructure standardization.

Additionally, High Lander required a reliable cloud environment capable of supporting a redundancy system for drones to communicate within, in case of system failure or outage.

Recognizing the necessity for a cloud transformation to support its increasing business needs, High Lander turned to Directeam because of its expertise in modernizing legacy cloud environments while avoiding business disruption.

Key Challenges:

1. No official ‘High Availability’ practice was implemented, affecting operational resiliency in case of failure or outage.
2. Lack of a scaling mechanism to easily expand resources during high demand peaks.
3. Manual deployments were creating operational bottlenecks.

Directeam’s solution: Swift migration to AWS and Infrastructure Modernization

The comprehensive solution offered by Directeam comprised several layers and methodologies:

• Executing a full cloud migration from their legacy infrastructure to a more advanced technology stack on top of AWS.
• Upgrading the microservices tech stack from Docker Compose environments to AWS-managed Kubernetes service, EKS.
• Deploying their workloads across multiple availability zones to enable high availability and prevent downtime in case of failure or outage.
• Implementing AWS CloudFront as a CDN for drone metadata communication to enhance overall performance and reduce the risk of DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks on their environments.
• Shifting the provisioning of new resources from a ClickOps methodology (using the AWS console) to a GitOps methodology by employing Terraform as their Infrastructure as Code (IaC) framework.
• Generating Terraform code representing the environment’s desired configuration and automating CI/CD deployments whenever new versions are released or when scaling and expanding to new regions.
• Migrating to IaC will enable High Lander to seamlessly onboard new projects and customers, dramatically reducing deployment times.
• Implementing Keda and Karpenter (open-source auto-scaling engines) for smart scaling of their Kubernetes clusters to meet real-time demand with optimal resource allocation and utilization.

The Results

With its user base growing fast, partly due to heightened demand for security drones and UTM services throughout the state of Israel, High Lander needed to complete its migration process as swiftly as possible, without operational interruptions to their existing business.

Thanks to Directeam’s expertise, experience, and level of commitment, High Lander’s legacy production environments were modernized and migrated to AWS in less than 3 months.

• By Using Terraform and a GitOps CI/CD methodology, High Lander deploys a new environment in less than a day, rather than weeks, enabling a more versatile business agility with no operational bottlenecks.
• High Lander benefits from additional AWS-based security measures such as DDOS protection and IDS (Intrusion Detection System) to protect their environments and assets.
• Cost optimization was not a formal KPI for the project, but implementing Keda and Karpenter led to more efficient resource allocation for optimal cluster utilization, which in turn reduced the overall infrastructure costs.