Implementation of a tool that automates the construction of subsequent infrastructures for the Flying Bisons company

Flying Bisons is a leader in the Digital Consulting industry. The domain of this Warsaw company is a comprehensive approach to creating products and digital experiences that achieve the business goals of its clients. Flying Bisons work in a comprehensive design process, which consists of m.in Research & Strategy, UX/UI Design, Web & Mobile Development as well as analytics and optimization. The portfolio of customers and long-term partners of Flying Bisons includes brands such as Hebe, KFC, Booksy, Bank Pekao, IKEA, Kompania Piwowarska, Na:Temat, and many others.

Our cooperation began with individual orders for the construction of infrastructures for Flying Bisons customers. With the passage of time and subsequent environments put into use, as well as the growing number of commissioned infrastructures, we jointly began to look for a solution that will automate the process of "setting up" new environments, saving time and money. Having already a lot of knowledge about the client's needs, after indicating all the most important expectations set for the solution we are looking for (work efficiency, very high safety standards, the highest possible level of automation) and taking into account the possibilities of development in the future, we decided to use the Ansible tool.

How it is done

The choice of Ansible allowed us to create a solution that, after entering only one command and a few variables, fully automated the construction of infrastructure. Due to the diverse needs and expectations of Flying Bisons customers, we have developed two basic types of infrastructures created in an automated process. The first is based solely on one production server with a test server built as a mirror image, and the second is based on three servers with full High Availability, which guarantees that the full availability of the application is maintained, even in the event of a potential failure of one of the servers.

The most important activities that are carried out as part of automation for both types of infrastructures are:

• System role – configures the system, users, updates packages, and secures the system
• Virtual Host – is used to configuring the end client page, using a role that automatically generates an SSH certificate.
• PHP – installation, and configuration along with modifications of configuration files in terms of security.
• Maria DB – a database engine for which we created the DB Create role, which automatically executes Query to MySQL Maria DB, creating a user and a new database. The role grants the database permissions and creates access and adds security to the database engine through the local host. Thanks to this, the customer does not have to perform any manual operations. The password for the user is generated in a random way (this applies to both the system user and the database user), based on the established criteria. This solution allowed to additionally secure the created environment.
• Redis - installation, and configuration.
• Nginx - installation from the manufacturer's repository, configuration and hardening, VHost configuration without SSL.

In addition, for an infrastructure of 3 servers, Cloudflare or OVH Load Balancer is used for traffic balancing, as appropriate.

Over time, at the request of Flying Bisons, we also added a role responsible for configuring Postgres, in order to allow you to select a database. Importantly, the customer uses automation processes exclusively in the OVH environment, but they have been designed by us in such a way that they can also be used by other Vendors.

A kind of challenge was to ensure parallel replication of the database on all three servers. For this purpose, we used the group replication option in MySQL, which allows replication between servers regardless of their number. This, in turn, opened the way for the use of ProxySQL, which is ultimately responsible for the proper replication of data on each server.

Summary

For Flying Bisons, we designed the implementation process and configured the Ansible tool, which is fully responsible for the automatic construction of subsequent infrastructures. Thanks to this, we have significantly reduced the time needed to create an environment, increased security, and reduced costs associated with building infrastructure.

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