Treewise Solutions are committed to providing long term and comprehensive solutions for tree owners and managers. In short, what these folks don’t know about trees isn’t worth knowing!
Their knowledge runs so deep that they decided to have a whole software platform built for them, and for other tree consultancies in the UK. They partnered with one of the leading software solutions providers here in Carlisle, who delivered an incredible and bespoke platform, but the team needed to layer in hosting and security expertise not usually available from a pure development team. Enter, Beaty Consultancy.
Productionising the App
The new Treewise app was running happily in a development environment in Digital Ocean, or DO for short. DO is a fantastic platform to get things up and running quickly, but doesn’t offer the depth of services often required for a full production-ready environment, and so the Beaty Consultancy team were tasked with building out just such a production grade platform to run the app.
For those not as familiar with software development terminology, production is just the copy of the app where real users really use the app. Think about a production-line. That’s where things are made which will go to a customer, and the production line must never stop, or the business loses money.
Naturally AWS was the choice for production, and we soon had a load balanced, auto-healing, autoscaling, cost-effective environment, with backups and patching all automated. But that isn’t where the story ends.
Features and Releases
One of the pain points for Treewise Solutions was around releasing updates to their app. As much as their team had tested the app in the development environment over on Digital Ocean, things didn’t always move to AWS so easily. The configuration was different, just by the nature that they’re two different cloud platforms, but also because developers need to have a high degree of control over their development servers. Those changes aren’t always documented, and so can’t be replicated in customer environments. That’s when things go wrong.
So what’s the solution? A CI/CD, or Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment pipeline! Basically, developer tip code in at the beginning of the pipeline, and the environment is updated to reflect those code changes at the other end of the pipe.
But of course there’s more to it than that. Integrated into the pipeline are checks such as;
- Does the code actually run? Even the best developers make mistakes
- Does the update break any previous fixes?
- Is app performance affected by the update?
- Have any security vulnerabilities been introduced by the updated code?
If everything passes, the new version is deployed to a Staging environment.
Ready, Set, Production!
Staging is an environment which has been purpose built to mirror production as closely as is practical. So that means the same type of servers, built with the same scripts, behind the same type and configuration of load balancer etc. The theory being, if it works in Staging, it will work in production. That’s the kind of certainty that helps business owners be confident in pressing the button to launch those changes into production.
“Which button” I hear you cry. Ah, well that’s the cool part – Treewise Solutions get an email once an update has been pushed out to Staging, with a button they can press to send exactly those changes out into production.
There is no limit to the number of releases they can have the developers send to Staging and work together to tweak, before they can send the final, polished, tested and perfect update out to production. Management can make a decision about when the production release will happen, but the ideal situation is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because everyone has confidence in every part of the code and pipeline. If it worked in Staging, it’ll work in production.
Like a bed salesperson, we sell sleep
When application development and releases are predictable and repeatable, business owners are able to sleep at night, and that’s the difference that working with Beaty Consultancy can make to startup software businesses.
