Finch Technical Exercise - DevOps Engineer

Context

A Bank is planning to launch a new web application, and you need to set up a scalable, secure, and automated infrastructure in AWS. Your task is to design, implement, and demonstrate an architecture that supports the application in a production environment.

Exercise Objectives

1. Deploy a high-availability architecture for a container-based web application.
2. Implement automation and CI/CD for the application deployment.
3. Ensure monitoring and logging of the infrastructure and application.
4. Ensure that the environment follows AWS best practices.

---

Exercise Requirements

Part 1: Automated Deployment and CI/CD

• Set up a CI/CD pipeline using any tool or combination of tools to:
  • Automatically deploy the web application to a container orchestration platform whenever there are code changes.
  • Integrate automated tests to verify the functionality of the application before deploying to production.
  • Use an automated build system to package and create container images from the source code.

Part 2: Security

• Configure user roles, policies, and credentials to follow security best practices:
  • Create least-privilege access policies for infrastructure resources, users, and services.
  • Use a secure system to manage sensitive information such as passwords, API keys, and certificates.
  • Secure internal communication between services through network segmentation, firewalls, or other methods.
  • Implement HTTPS for secure web traffic and manage SSL certificates accordingly.

Part 3: Monitoring and Logging

• Implement a monitoring and logging solution:
  • Collect performance metrics from your compute instances, container platform, and database.
  • Set up auditing to track changes to the infrastructure and system events.
  • Ensure that application and system logs are centralized for analysis and troubleshooting, with a solution for log aggregation and visualization.

Part 4: Scalability and High Availability

• Ensure that the infrastructure can scale based on demand:
  • Configure automatic scaling for compute resources based on defined metrics like CPU, memory, or network usage.
  • Implement scaling policies in the container orchestration platform to adjust the number of application instances based on traffic load.
  • Ensure that the database is set up for high availability and can fail over to a secondary instance in case of an outage.

Part 5: Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Use Terraform to deploy the following infrastructure:

• A highly available and redundant network architecture that spans multiple data centers to ensure fault tolerance and resilience.
• A compute group that can automatically adjust its size based on load, with traffic distributed via a load balancing system.
• A container-based platform to run the application, with support for scaling.
• A managed database service in a private network segment for security and high availability.
• Object storage for static files or backups.

---

Deliverables

1. Git Repository:

   • Code for the infrastructure and CI/CD pipeline configuration.
   • Instructions to deploy the infrastructure and application.

2. Documentation:

   • Explanation of the architecture and technical decisions made.
   • Instructions on how to access and analyze logs, metrics, and monitoring.
   • Details on how security practices are applied in the environment.

3. Live Demo:

   • Presentation of the infrastructure and deployment.
   • Demonstration of the system’s ability to handle scalability and failover.
   • Show the CI/CD pipeline in action.

---

Evaluation Criteria

1. Automation: How automated the deployment and CI/CD process is.
2. Infrastructure: Correct configuration and best practices for ensuring high availability and scalability.
3. Security: Implementation of security best practices for roles, policies, and network configuration.
4. Monitoring: Proper configuration of monitoring and logging solutions.
5. Presentation: Quality and clarity of documentation and live demo.