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Major Direct-to-Home TV Provider Focuses on DevOps

Background

A prominent Direct-to-Home (D2H) television programming and Over-the-Top (OTT) IPTV services provider engages in various IT engineering and systems development projects. The provider needed to standardize and document its DevOps practices and tools. This standardization effort aimed to enhance the efficiency of application development and on-demand release management processes.

Challenge

The organization cultivated a range of DevOps methodologies, enriching them further through acquisitions of various companies and technologies. Despite DevOps being widely embraced within its IT department, certain projects and application development teams clung to manual deployment and release management practices, neglecting the potential benefits of DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tools. These manual processes, aside from being time-consuming, harbored risks associated with potential errors. In response, the company launched an initiative to standardize its DevOps protocols, with the overarching goal of bolstering its competitive advantage by streamlining application development and optimizing the release process.

Solution

Our team successfully established comprehensive build and continuous deployment pipelines, covering both testing and production environments. We made significant improvements to security practices in the process, focusing on secure container image creation by updating dependencies to the latest versions and addressing known security vulnerabilities. Additionally, we introduced the use of reusable templates and components for pipelines, which could be applied to multiple projects within the GitLab platform. These templates were constructed using YAML, inline scripting in Python, and Shell scripting. To enhance efficiency further, our DevOps engineers implemented dynamic and cross-project pipelines. They accomplished this by employing Python scripts to generate pipelines at runtime, utilizing Jinja templating.

Outcome

Our implementation with company resulted in several positive outcomes and benefits from Niha Tech’s ability and execution to streamline and revamp its DevOps processes, including

  • Improved deployment quality by catching errors early and minimizing errors pushed to production.
  • Reduced time to deployment for new projects from weeks to days by using flags to enable/disable parts of the pipeline.
Improved overall system security by using secure base images and building audits.

Background

Dish Networks, one of the largest D2H and TV programming providers, does a lot of IT engineering and systems development projects. Dish had a need to standardize and rationalize its DevOps processes and tools, in order to streamline its app-dev, and on-demand release management.

Challenge

Dish had over the years developed several DevOps practices, which were further diversified with Dish’s acquisitions of several other companies and technologies. Also some projects and app-dev teams did not use DevOps and CI/CD tools, and relied on manual deployments and release management, which was both error-prone and risky. Thus, from systems integration to on-time, on-demand release of new IT services and applications to business was becoming challenging and time-consuming. Dish thus desired to optimize and standardize its DevOps processes and tools, to ensure it continued to have competitive advantage over its competitors, from rapid app-dev and new app releases to support its business.

Niha’s Solution

Niha implemented E2E build and continuous deployment pipelines for Production and testing. Our team also enhanced modern security practices for building container images ensuring latest versions of dependencies were used thus avoiding any security vulnerabilities and surprises in production. Our team implemented reusable templates/components for pipelines which could be used across a wider project in GitLab using yaml, inline python scripts, and shell scriptings. Lastly, our DevOps engineers implemented dynamic pipeline and cross project pipelines using python scripts to render pipeline using Jinja templating at run time.

Outcome

Dish had several positive outcomes and benefits from Niha’s ability and execution to streamline and revamp its DevOps processes, including:

  • Improved deployment quality by catching errors early and minimizing errors pushed to production.
  • Reduced time to deployment for new projects from weeks to days by using flags to enable/disable parts of the pipeline.
  • Improved overall system security by using secure base images and build audits

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