Automated ECS Deployment with PR Preview Environments
Services provided on this Project
About the Customer
Orbital Installations LLC is a rapidly growing SaaS company providing construction and installation management solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across North America. Their platform serves thousands of daily active users who depend on consistent availability and rapid feature delivery. As a technology-forward organization, the company operates on a rapid release cycle, deploying new features and updates multiple times per week to stay competitive in their market.
Problem Statement
The customer faced significant challenges with their development and deployment workflow that hindered their ability to innovate and scale. The development team lacked isolated preview environments for testing pull requests, creating bottlenecks when multiple features were tested simultaneously. The deployment process was semi-manual, requiring significant DevOps involvement with deployments taking 2-3 hours. The lack of automation increased the risk of human error and configuration drift between environments, leading to "works on my machine" scenarios. Infrastructure was managed through AWS Console operations, CloudFormation templates, and manual scripts, making it difficult to track changes or reproduce environments.
CLIENT
Orbital Installations LLC
PROJECT SCHEDULE
Jan 2025 — Apr 2025
PROJECT SIZE
$200,000 to $499,999
Proposed Solution
Multi-Cluster ECS Architecture
Architected separate Amazon ECS clusters for development and production environments, each deployed in private subnets across multiple availability zones. Utilized AWS Fargate for serverless container management with automatic scaling based on demand.
Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
Implemented 100% of the infrastructure using Terraform, completely eliminating manual AWS Console operations. All AWS infrastructure including VPCs, subnets, security groups, ECS clusters, and ALBs are defined in modular, reusable Terraform code stored in Git.
GitHub Actions CI/CD with PR Preview Environments
Implemented a sophisticated CI/CD workflow that automatically creates ephemeral preview environments for every pull request. When a PR is opened, GitHub Actions builds a Docker image, pushes it to ECR, creates an isolated ECS service, and provides a unique URL for testing changes in isolation.
Automated Preview Environment Management
Preview environments persist throughout the PR lifecycle and automatically update when new commits are pushed. When PRs are closed or merged, automated cleanup workflows remove ECS services and associated resources, ensuring no resource waste or cost accumulation.
Production Deployment Automation
When changes are merged to main branch, GitHub Actions automatically builds production Docker images, updates ECS task definitions, and performs rolling updates with zero downtime. The pipeline implements blue-green deployment strategies, health checks, and automatic rollback capabilities.
Comprehensive Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana
Deployed Prometheus and Grafana on dedicated ECS services to provide enterprise-grade monitoring. Prometheus scrapes metrics from all ECS tasks, while Grafana dashboards provide real-time visualization of system health, application performance, and business KPIs.
Secure Network Architecture
All ECS tasks run in private subnets with no direct internet access, communicating through VPC endpoints for enhanced security. Application Load Balancers in public subnets provide entry points with AWS WAF protection. All traffic is encrypted in transit using TLS certificates from AWS Certificate Manager.
This comprehensive AWS cloud-native solution leverages Infrastructure as Code and modern CI/CD practices to deliver automated deployment workflows with PR preview environments, enabling rapid feature delivery while maintaining high reliability and security standards.
Core tech stack we work with
Leveraging the Leading Programming Languages and Frameworks to Deliver Reliable, Scalable Solutions.
Outcomes & Success Metrics
Significant reduction in scam calls, improved uptime, enhanced scalability, and efficient AI integration.
Results and Benefits
The transformation to automated ECS deployment with PR preview environments delivered substantial improvements across development velocity, operational efficiency, and system reliability. Pull request review time decreased significantly, from an average of 2-3 days to approximately 8-10 hours, as QA teams could immediately test changes in isolated preview environments. The development team increased their deployment frequency from 2-3 deployments per week to 8-10 deployments per week. Time from code commit to production deployment reduced from 3-4 hours to under 40 minutes for the entire automated pipeline.
Infrastructure management time decreased through Infrastructure as Code, with the ability to provision complete environments in under 30 minutes versus several days with manual processes. Automated cleanup of PR preview environments saved costs by eliminating orphaned resources.
Production incidents related to deployment issues decreased from 8-10 incidents per quarter to 2-3 incidents. Mean time to recovery (MTTR) for incidents improved from 40+ minutes to 12-15 minutes through automated rollback capabilities. Bug detection shifted left in the development cycle, with a significant portion of issues now caught in PR preview environments before reaching production. Zero-downtime deployments ensured high uptime even during frequent release cycles. Developer productivity increased as measured by features delivered per sprint, enabled by rapid feedback loops and reduced context switching.
About the Partner
CodetoKloud is an AWS Partner specializing in cloud infrastructure modernization, DevOps transformation, and automated deployment solutions. We help organizations build scalable, secure, and efficient cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code and modern CI/CD practices. Our team of AWS-certified engineers has deep expertise in container orchestration, serverless architectures, and GitOps methodologies. We focus on eliminating manual processes and implementing automation that accelerates software delivery while improving reliability and security. Our approach emphasizes Infrastructure as Code, comprehensive monitoring, and developer-friendly workflows that enable teams to deploy with confidence.