Deployment Plan and Infrastructure
We plan to follow the following roll-out strategy, adapted for our use case (because this is an internal tool, it won't see consumption by the stakeholder's clients).
- Release to stakeholder
- Release to development team's family and friends
- Release to other users at the stakeholder's company
We follow continuous deployment and trunk-based development, so there are not specific versions for specific users. We will always be collecting feedback based on the latest version.
The stakeholder has indicated that they want to deploy to AWS, so we have provided an AWS CDK template which can be used to deploy the project and its dependencies (Postgres, etc.) to AWS in a containerized environment (AWS Elastic Container Service). Pictured below is a flow diagram for the deployment plan under AWS:
In our initial testing, the AWS-deployed version will cost around $66.10/month ($CAD) to operate, so for the version that we host over the life of the project, we are using an Ubuntu box which is provided by CSSE. We use an Ansible playbook to deploy everything required for our app (Docker, nginx, Grafana, Loki, Postgres, Prometheus) and we use GitHub actions to continuously deploy our main branch to this server (including schema changes and new container images).
In the future, this playbook could also be used for a virtual machine running on AWS, which may save on cost compared to using AWS-native technologies (like ECS, AWS WAF).