Challenge

bit media education solutions GmbH is involved in the digitalisation of the education sector. Among other things, it supports public schools in the administrative management of school operations and provides innovative, digitised learning platforms.

When setting up the portal for final theses (short: ABA-Portal), the aim was to create a technically scalable and maintainable infrastructure to modern standards, based on cloud solutions and Cloud Native standards. At the same time, the infrastructure should be implemented in a cost-effective way, so that resources are only used when they are really needed.

In addition to the infrastructure itself, a modern software delivery process should be implemented, and modern monitoring should be set up to meet current cloud-native standards.

Solution

The infrastructure has been fully automated using managed services (e.g. SKS - Secure Kubernetes Service, DBaaS) and Terraform, so that infrastructure updates are done exclusively via IaC (Infrastructure as Code).

In addition to the basic infrastructure, security best practices were considered and automated certificate management, networking and DNS configuration were implemented as part of this effort.

After the technical setup of the monitoring using the Grafana stack (Grafana, Prometheus), Grafana dashboards were set up to provide key metrics and centralised monitoring for the entire environment.

Based on the existing source code management tool GitLab, pipelines were set up to automate infrastructure updates and enable developer-friendly deployment of software components, updates and bug fixes using the GitOps Operator ArgoCD.

To implement a fully covered backup solution, we used the k8s backup operator k8up.

Impact

By setting up the environment and emphasising continuous automation, the ABA portal could be deployed on a modern infrastructure in a very short time.

Developer-focused pipelines automate all deployment and build processes, improving the developer experience.

With Kubernetes as the foundation of the infrastructure, the ABA portal is implemented in a scalable manner according to modern standards, enabling it to effectively handle spontaneous peaks.