A key element of our work with the UK Government consisted of migrating the existing systems portfolio to a strategic Kubernetes cluster. This required a close working relationship with their DevOps team. Strategic changes in the cluster required the re-design of the current release process. The key challenges in implementation this was managing several high-ranking stakeholders whilst working on a solution within arbitrary technological limitations.
The novel automated release and delivery procedure that was created took advantage of the rapid image builds within Drone.io. Before the live update, each release candidate image is thoroughly examined by stakeholders on UAT environment with the replica of production data. Therefore, this process ensure that the requirements of contracted changes were met, and the chance of mistakes was minimised.
The Drone Delivery Queue process was subsequently selected to be presented in the ‘Forge Tech’ talk at the UK Home Office. This procedure is now followed by other projects and a presentation summarising our involvement can be found here. A specialised Docker Tooling image was also created and released to the UK Home Office Open Source space (https://github.com/UKHomeOffice/docker-srrs-tooling).