La Banca

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Overview

La Banca is Uruguay´s official eGaming operator. The organization prides itself on efficiency and professionalism in operations with a single goal: to provide good healthy entertainment to their customers. The gaming offer includes keno, lotto, scratchcards, and sports betting games through their web, mobile and retail channels.

With over 80 years of history, La Banca is one of the most important companies in the country and has been adopting technology to leverage its operations and lead the market.

The Challenge

With digital transformation initiatives gathering pace, organizations aim to provide the best product and service to their customers at the earliest. Customer experience and satisfaction are the topmost priorities. La Banca was looking at creating an optimized platform for delivering their services where their services can be cost-efficient and more accessible. The current infrastructure system in place was hindering their progress.

In the line of business, they had a goal to maintain a strong foundation for building and improving customer relations and interaction. The client was developing and maintaining their internal applications or performing manual deployments in their various environments. The manual processes made the development process highly prone to human errors. Besides that, the manual process also included reduced efficiency and impacted the code quality.

Some of the major pain points for development and operations teams included:

Increase in development time and a growing backlog of non-critical errors.
Resource utilization challenges surfaced as the existing process did not allow optimal utilization of resources.
The coding process was prone to human error, and correcting the code could cause further damages to other functionalities of the application and raise new defects.

The Approach

Alabama Solutions, partnered with La Banca and worked side by side with their Development and Operations teams to address the four core issues:

Improve the development process
Help client to automate the CI/CD pipeline
Shorten the time to debug errors
Improve the velocity and speed of development in the release cycle

The team at La Banca needs to collaborate continuously to ensure that IT solutions are available to businesses on time and keep them running without disruption. We chose a DevOps approach focused on automation and emphasizing people, process, and tools that allow greater collaboration and understanding across stakeholders.

The Solution

Alabama Solutions, through its Software Engineering Garage, and La Banca engineers focused on improving the delivery of new software features, fixes, and updates faster.

CI/CD Pipeline Implementation

We chose GitLab as our CI/CD automation tool and as our version control system enabling clear code reviews, feedback loops, asset version control, and powerful branching patterns to help our client’s developers solve problems. Alabama Solutions engineers designed a CI/DC pipeline to accelerate development, testing, defect fixes, and release updates for our customer’s web applications.

Unique Pipelines were implemented for each environment to perform automated deployments.

We configured Webhooks so that the pipelines would notify on slack channels when a new push or merge took place on the repository.

Containers and Orchestration

We applied dockers on the web applications for containerization purposes. Our solution incorporated the Red Hat® OpenShift® and Docker for optimal container orchestration to automate containers’ deployment, scaling, management, and networking with an on-premise solution.

Our DevOps team at Alabama aligned the development, testing, and staging environments with the client’s environments by making them precisely similar to work seamlessly.

Code Quality Analysis

We enhance release workflows with Continuous Code Quality & Code Security using Sonarqube. With automated Static Code Analysis rules, we where able to release quality code and catch bugs to prevent undefined behaviour from impacting end-users, fixing vulnerabilities that could compromise the apps.

DevOps Test Automation

We automated testing activities in DevOps to enable developers to resolve issues and ship code changes faster with high-quality deliverables. To achieve this, we used Jasmine (behavior-driven development framework for testing JavaScript code), Karma node-based test tool for testing across multiple real browsers. Our DevOps automation also included Test-Driven Development with Mockito for testing APIs and JUnit to write and run repeatable automated tests.

Load and performance testing

We automated performance testing of the client’s web applications and enabled load-testing for the infrastructure and checked the number of concurrent users the system could handle to ensure a robust and high-performance system. Locust was the weapon of choice for this scenario.

The Results

The entire CI/CD pipeline implementation was successfully completed on schedule with full automation.

The fully automated CI/CD solution minimized the risk of manual errors and accelerated the development cycle and releases.
Developers’ time is now spent fruitfully on coding instead of manual deployments and subsequent delays.
Manual implementation and debugging errors were time-consuming, but with our fully automated CI/CD solution, the entire process gets completed quickly.

Improved IT infrastructure visibility and management enabled La Banca to efficiently manage its IT and development activities and deliver application changes to business with a quicker turnaround.

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