Helping a Top Offensive Security Provider Use DevOps to the Max

Are you looking for a DevOps-as-a-Service provider to augment your in-house DevOps expertise? Read this case study to discover how we can help.

Security Provider (NDA)

The potential of DevOps practices is immeasurable. Essentially, it’s a gateway to a high-quality product and happy users — prerequisites for a software business to succeed. At the same time, sticking to DevOps practices isn’t enough for a software project to thrive. It’s critical to have extensive expertise in DevOps solutions and the mechanics of CI/CD pipelines, as well as a readiness for continuous experimentation and improvement (even if it seems things are working fine). For precisely this reason, one renowned offensive security provider sought our assistance.

TEAM

251-500 people

PERIOD OF COLLABORATION

2022 - present

CLIENT’S LOCATION

Tempe, Arizona, United States

About the client

The client featured in this case study is a prominent offensive security services provider.  They specialize in uncovering security vulnerabilities in their clients’ apps, networks, and infrastructure with the help of penetration testing, red teaming, and comprehensive security assessment. 

It’s the largest private firm in this field, with Fortune 500 companies among its clientele. 

Among other tools, the client used:

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AWS

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Kubernetes

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Terraform

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ArgoCD

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OpenSearch

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Prometheus

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Grafana

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GitHub Actions

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CircleCI

The challenge: The lack of DevOps expertise needed for growth

Aside from providing consulting services, the client is constantly building, releasing, and improving cybersecurity products for their customers. One of their key offerings is an automated continuous testing platform that enables users to discover and proactively eliminate security gaps before hackers even learn about them. 

And since the user base of this platform spans worldwide and keeps growing, the solution must be stable enough to perform brilliantly under significant load. This requires enhancing the system continuously — a task that had been lying on the shoulders of their in-house DevOps team. They had created an infrastructure that relied on Kubernetes for container orchestration, Terraform for cloud resources provisioning, and Argo CD for GitOps-based deployment automation.

But there’s always room for improvement when it comes to DevOps for an enterprise. So, at the beginning of 2022, they realized their internal DevOps expertise didn’t suffice and started looking for a DevOps-as-a-Service vendor.

Since we have the required expertise, they reached out to us.

Our cooperation: Two experts combining three roles

In April 2022, two of our experts joined the client’s DevOps team (which originally had five members) to perform the following tasks.

1

Our standard routine for DevOps in the cloud

First of all, we amplify the client’s in-house efforts on a daily basis, helping them perform tasks from the backlog.

For example, we help them take care of EKS cluster updates. That is, upon each new cluster version, we evaluate how it will affect the entire infrastructure and how we can deploy it with minimal downtime. 

2

R&D

Certainly, since we are a DevOps and DevSecOps service provider with extensive expertise in the field and a track record of projects across domains, our role goes beyond the standard DevOps routine. We also contribute as R&D experts, fostering a culture of continuous learning, experimentation, and improvement in the client’s team. 

3

Infrastructure improvements 

More significant works were necessary to get the client ahead of the game. 

For example, one of their requests was to implement the observability feature, which is key to the stability of the client’s infrastructure. In cooperation with their internal team, we rolled out a log analysis solution that allows the client to establish a baseline and monitor changes in metrics against this baseline. 

Additionally, to enhance the capabilities of the solution, we created two environments — sandbox and production — which aggregate logs and metrics from all services and applications. While the sandbox is designed purely for testing purposes, production enables the client to assess the infrastructure’s health by checking all system logs and metrics and generating dashboards to visualize the acquired data. 

As a result, the client’s team can anticipate or identify anomalies and proactively eliminate their causes before they affect the entire system. 

Results: Exceptional performance despite time zone differences

Despite a several-hour difference between us (Ukraine) and the client’s team (the U.S.), we always deliver on time and at the required level of quality. 

As a result, the client is very satisfied with our cooperation and constantly reminds us of that. And this is just the beginning — the contract has been extended for another year.

Future plans: In pursuit of perfection

The cooperation is ongoing: the to-do list for the DevOps team is brimming with tasks for months to come. 

One of our priorities now is to migrate the self-hosted components of the cloud infrastructure to AWS-managed cloud services. There are also legacy parts of the infrastructure that require modernization: moving services from ECS to EKS is one of our tasks here. 

On top of that, the DevOps market never stands still, and neither does the client’s infrastructure. AWS and other providers of DevOps solutions for enterprises constantly release new versions of their tools. As a result, there always will be room for improvement, a challenge that our team is capable of handling with ease.

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