Case Study
Seamless Zero-Downtime Deployments for a Large-Scale Government Digital Literacy Program
Challenge
A government-led digital literacy program with over 7.5 Crore enrollments faced challenges with frequent night-time deployments, happening 3-4 times a week. The IT team was stretched thin, handling 30-minute to 1-hour downtimes, followed by intensive checks to ensure system stability post-deployment. The team sought a solution to reduce downtime and alleviate the strain on their resources.
The key challenges were the following:
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Frequent deployments required late-night work, impacting team morale and productivity.
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Downtimes led to temporary service unavailability, affecting user experience.
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Ensuring post-deployment sanity was time-consuming and stressful for the IT team.
Approach
Blue-Green Deployment
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Xponentium restructured the system architecture, making all service components (business layer, UI layer, data layer, authorization layer, microservices) stateless.
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Session affinity was removed, and single points of failure were eliminated.
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The new version of the application was deployed using a blue-green approach, allowing seamless switching between environments without downtime.
Alpha Release Strategy
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Features were gradually rolled out through alpha releases, starting with a limited impact and expanding progressively.
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This approach ensured system stability by catching potential issues early in the deployment process.
Xponentium Impact
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Zero Downtime: Blue-green deployments eliminated the need for scheduled downtimes, allowing updates to be deployed during business hours without affecting service availability.
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Improved Team Efficiency: The phased alpha release strategy reduced the burden on the IT team, allowing them to maintain system stability without late-night deployments. This led to better morale and a more balanced workload.
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Enhanced System Stability: The gradual rollout of features minimized the risk of major failures, ensuring a more stable and reliable system for the large user base.