Containers for a team with no DevOps

The company

Art of Problem Solving is an education company teaching advanced mathematics to students, online and in person.

The problem

AoPS runs several education products — AoPS Academy, AoPS Online, Beast Academy, with more planned. Customers routinely buy access to more than one, and moving them between products required manual intervention every time.

Two constraints shaped the answer. There was no dedicated DevOps team, and there was not going to be one. So whatever we built had to be operable by application engineers as a side concern, not as a job.

What I did

I ran the assessment and discovery, then designed an architecture around ECS with AWS Fargate.

Fargate is the specific reason this works for AoPS. It removes server provisioning and EC2 cluster management from the picture entirely — no node pools to patch, no capacity to plan, no cluster upgrades landing on a team that does not have anyone whose job that is. The operational surface an application team has to hold in their head shrinks to the service definition.

CircleCI handled CI/CD and deployment orchestration, with supporting AWS infrastructure for networking, monitoring and service discovery.

I oversaw the proof of concept in staging and ran stakeholder communication through JIRA and Slack for the duration.

Result

Manual deployment steps were replaced by automation, customer transitions between products got faster, and support tickets for technical issues went down. Longer term it gave them a platform that could take a fourth and fifth product without a corresponding increase in operational load.

This engagement did not publish quantitative outcomes.