The workflow of the ITECS webteam was to manually deploy new versions of their apps into NFS. This was slow, inefficient, and prone to error. Furthermore, apps operating from NFS were significantly slower than the previous AFS filesystem, resulting in a degraded user experience for students, faculty, and staff. Owing to the poor performance of NFS and the desire to automate app deployment, it was decided to migrate the ITECS web apps to AWS. Jenkins and GitHub Actions, being among the most popular automation tools, were initially considered. However, both were rejected for their complexity and lack of user-friendly interfaces. Buddy was ultimately selected instead, as it has an easy-to-use interface and is a SaaS. Once the pipelines and other infrastructure were set up, commits to an app's repo would automatically trigger the testing, build, and deployment process. With this process in place, the webteam can quickly deploy changes to applications without worrying about manual steps. Users have also expressed satisfaction with the improved performance of the web apps. There were numerous challenges in moving the ITECS web applications into AWS and simultaneously automating their deployment. For example, the webteam initially had no visibility into the success or failure of deployments. I implemented a Slack integration and created a dashboard to address these issues.
