Transcript: Deploying New Enterprise Web Applications in Minutes - Part 1

This is transcript. For the video, see Automating Infrastructure with EKS and Pulumi Deploying New Enterprise Web Applications in Minutes - Part 1.

[00:00:00] Michael Meyers: Welcome to our Tag1 TeamTalk on automating infrastructure with EKS and Pulumi to deploy new enterprise web applications in minutes. I'm Michael Meyers, the managing director of Tag1 consulting, and I'm joined today by two very special guests. Jeff Sheltren, our CIO and Travis Whitehead, one of our senior infrastructure engineers.

[00:00:21] Our talk is broken down into two segments. This first part, we're going to be talking about the business problems and challenges that large enterprises face. And in part two, we're going to talk about the infrastructure solution and really dig under the hood and talk about the technology and how it works, so be sure to check that out. Are we talking about, this is a real world project that we're doing for one of the largest companies in the world, a top fortune 500 organization. We can't disclose who they are. The work is done under a confidentiality agreement, but I think that, they, and, and most other large enterprises share the same common problem and that's that, they need to launch applications all the time. And they have a limited amount of technology resources to make that happen. And there are groups and departments that don't have a lot of funding, and there are groups, departments that have insane amounts of funding and. What, the holy grail for these organizations is, a turnkey system, user can go to a website, a portal, plugging some information and spin up a highly complex custom application.

[00:01:29] Yeah. In minutes, right? Reducing the business use’s reliance on technology, freeing technology resources up to focus on other things, giving small departments access to the same powerful technology that big departments have. And so on. And, I think that some organizations have made progress on at least the templatizing application side of things we're going to talk about.

[00:01:54] I think they made a lot less progress on the infrastructure few have done both. And, and that's the really exciting thing here is we've had the success on the software side and now we are automating the infrastructure side as well. So there are these two different problems, there's the software component and there's the infrastructure component.

[00:02:15] Jeff, can you give us a, a little bit of a better understanding of like the, the, the software side of things and the business challenges? I touched on it a little bit.

[00:02:26]Jeff Sheltren: Yeah. I mean, in this case, we're kind of targeting a common set of yeah, of, of modules and functionality for websites, internal websites for the company.

[00:02:37]So this is a number of things like an integration with their single sign-on, integration with like a standardized search interface or the ability for your site to be in next, and shown in the search of like the main company intranet site. There's been, we've been working there for years, developing these really large websites and developed a lot of custom code that is super useful and integrates into all the different aspects of the business, whether that's financial, HR related, you name it. And the goal here, being, giving these smaller groups, the ability to take all those tools and not even have to understand them, but be able to , implement them and leverage them for their own website.

[00:03:29]Michael Meyers: So yeah, tons of functionality out of the box that they can leverage , the ability to spin them up really quickly. Also, not only does it help on the, the expediting, release, and empowering people to be in control of technology and the small business units to have that large capability , maintaining applications is a huge challenge to these organizations, right?

[00:03:56]Right. Are launching a lot of them. You know, I would imagine that there are advantages here, versus technology sprawl. Is that something that organizations struggle with? How does this help on that front?

[00:04:11] Jeff Sheltren: Definitely. I mean, you see people just fighting the same battles over and over again.

[00:04:16] So being able to just solve it once and share that code and have it leveraged by different groups is awesome. So in this particular case, I think what's really great is being able to have kind of a, a single code repository for a website, and we're going to use that to deploy all of these turnkey websites.

[00:04:35]And so being able to maintain that super easily. If there's a security patch or whatever that comes out, we can just apply it in one place and easily deploy it everywhere. It's not these individual business groups having the like hire on their own web developers and, and do their own maintenance.

[00:04:53]So being able to run a website without ever thinking about like neither the infrastructure maintenance, nor the software maintenance is like, that dream come true. It's like Squarespace and all these companies that are like push button, spin me up a website. And I want this theme that looks nice and all that, most companies don't have that ability and everyone's having to kind of recreate the same thing over and over again.

[00:05:18] So being able to have a website, that's already ready and integrated with their SSO using the company font and company theme , and even cool things like, editorial workflows. So having a super customizable workflow where people can basically create a version of the website before it goes live and have the ability to have different editors and administrators review it and approve it. And then just like a one-click push button and suddenly all that new content is live. These are the kinds of things that people would love to have, but they can't create on their own.

[00:05:56] Michael Meyers: Yeah, this organization has really fostered like internal open source and sharing of code so that, different projects develop integrations into different systems or create features and functionality like content staging, and that gets, incorporated back into this base template that people can then launch off of and, just getting more and more and more functionality out of the box. I saw a site that they stood up for a demo and it looked amazing, but complete corporate look and feel like it looked like the company, like I was like, it looks so much more impressive than it was, it was a simple demo, and I was like, wow, you guys have done so much.

[00:06:37] So it looks great. And I know that, a lot of these in, in, in really large enterprises, things have to go through security reviews, there's usability, accessibility audits, and, there's a lot of compliance. And so I, that's another huge advantage, in, in, reducing the amount of resource burden, this application template is a distribution, whatever you want to call it has been reviewed and approved.

[00:07:04] And so, the, the, the security team, they have less to review, the compliance teams, so it's like, you're able to get things done faster and you're reducing the workload on all these other different groups and departments. And so, it's, it's, it's really helping, everybody in the organization focus on driving value and not reinventing the wheel.

[00:07:27] It's not just like, the technologists building the same features and functionality over and over again. It's the accessibility people having to review the same thing 10 times and the security team saying this is fine. And so that's, that's great. At the same time, there is no cookie cutter model, right?

[00:07:46] There is no one size fits all. And so, these application templates can be a good starting point. But what happens when, I, as, a department, [00:08:00] go beyond the constraints of what that offers me, maybe I want to change something, add something, you know? Do I have that ability to do that?

[00:08:09] Jeff Sheltren: Yeah. So I think kind of what we're aiming for with this project is. our main priority is to make it super simple for business groups, without developer resources, to be able to spin up a website. There's obviously gonna be groups that, that what we've designed doesn't quite fit their needs and they need to customize it, in which case it's super easy to kind of plug in. Maybe they, they want to fork our Git repo and make some code changes to the website. We can certainly accommodate that and still host it on the same infrastructure. The other side of it is we've created all this infrastructure as code.

[00:08:50]So it's super easy for anyone with enough. Experience around deploying things like that to AWS could just take our Pulumi code, deploy their own EKS clusters, databases, cache servers, everything else, and have a, you know, whatever size website they need. Maybe not a super small one, like we're targeting for the most part.

[00:09:11]They could, they could have a custom website and deploy it using our templates as a starting point or even. for the most part, they're going to cover 99% of people's needs. And it would mostly be kind of website side development, I would say.

[00:09:30] Michael Meyers: Yep. And they're always going to be technologists and technology teams and even projects that rightfully need a really custom build and, on the extreme end, that's still possible, so you have the templatized approach that you can stand up turnkey. You can graduate to customize that with your own development resources, you can customize that greatly. And, or start from complete custom, with some shared components.

[00:10:00] So it, it, the idea is to try and meet the needs of everyone across the organization. And I remember, they have some really exciting long-term plans, infrastructures as service as a base level, a platform as a service on top of that, and then a SAS solution. And, as, as a, a business unit or a technology team, you can come in anywhere along the stack.

[00:10:26] No, the business users use the SAS platform for these turnkey solutions, you know? But they're not tied to it, they can, they can graduate up and down this stack and, the technology team has sort of standards and , on the extreme end, you can violate everything within reason.

[00:10:44]But it's like good luck and God bless. And, and you have to understand your, your maintenance costs, your security constraints and things of that nature. But to the degree that you stay in, like the first two buckets, there's a lot of win for everybody, reduced [00:11:00] maintenance, reduced, compliance and security and all these standards.

[00:11:03] So, no restrictions, you know, and, and I think that's critical. An organization needs to be able to do what it needs to do to be successful, building a system that says, you can only do this, is, is going to lead to circumvention and people jumping right to the free for all.

[00:11:20]Which is, is sort of the last resort, right? You don't want to prohibit people entirely from doing it, or you want to dis-incentivize them, and incentivize them to do things that are going to benefit them and, and you as a, as a technology organization. So, yeah.

[00:11:39] Travis Whitehead: And just, just to add to what you were saying earlier, too, like with the question of what happens if you want that extra customizability, that that approach is not just forking, the common distribution and then maintaining your own separate thing.

[00:11:51] The really great part about this pattern is that when they go out and they decide, okay, we are going to pay someone to build this customization that gets submitted back to the shared distribution. So you might be a little group without the budget to like go out and build all these custom features. But as soon as one other group does decide to do that, everybody else gets it for free.

[00:12:10] And that's, that's the really great part about working from that common distribution in the first place.

[00:12:15] Michael Meyers: That's tremendous power. Excellent. Well, thank you guys for, for giving a sense of the, the business goals and challenges and how we're solving it. Please stick around for part two, where we're going to dig under the hood and talk about how, from an infrastructure standpoint, we make all of this happen, and enable these business users to stand up these applications , very quickly through automation.

[00:12:39] We're gonna put all of the links in the show notes under the video. So be sure to check those out. If you like this talk, please remember to upvote, share, and subscribe. You can check out our past talks at tag1.com/tag1teamtalks. As always. We would love your input and feedback on this topic on ideas for future topics, you can reach us at tag1teamtalks@tag1consulting.com. And again, a huge thank you, Jeff and Travis for joining us and to all of our listeners. Take care. We'll see you soon. Thanks.

[00:13:15] Jeff Sheltren: Thanks. Bye.