MarPoint is a leading maritime system integrator and IT services company, delivering IT and network solutions to over 3,000 vessels. To provide the best possible service, we employ DevOps practices, including Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).
Benefits of CI/CD in Maritime IT
CI/CD streamlines software development by integrating code into a shared repository and automatically deploying it to test and production environments. This speeds up delivery to production, resolves issues quickly, and keeps the code in a releasable state. In demanding industries like Maritime IT, CI/CD can become crucial to minimize downtime, ensure up-to-date systems, proactively detect issues and resolve them efficiently.
Challenges of Integrating CI/CD in Maritime IT
Integrating CI/CD in Maritime IT presents challenges such as seamless integration with diverse update delivery systems and ensuring built images are always deployed to the correct environment. MarPoint tackles these challenges through centralized management and monitoring, while leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store, manage, and deploy container images and standalone applications.
Advantages of CI/CD at MarPoint
At MarPoint, CI/CD is integrated into our DevOps practices to streamline and automate software builds and deployment. Our development team integrates code into shared repositories multiple times daily, and our pipelines deploy the code to test and production environments. This helps us identify and resolve issues quickly and keeps our systems up-to-date with the latest features and security patches. Additionally, our CI/CD also facilitates easy rollbacks and tracks all releases and build artifacts.
Reference setup
Here’s an diagram that shows the CI/CD process in action:
This diagram shows the main steps involved in the CI/CD process:
- Developer writes code on their machine and commits it to the source code repository.
- The code is automatically built on the build server, which is a dedicated machine or a virtual machine in the cloud.
- The code is automatically tested in a test or staging environment. This environment should be as close as possible to the production environment to detect any issues before they reach production.
- If the tests are successful, the code is approved by QA or operations team and deployed to the production environment within the next maintenance window.
This diagram shows how the process is automated, but also how there is human approval involved in the final step before the code is released to production, to ensure that the quality and stability of the code is maintained.
TLDR;
In conclusion, MarPoint leverages the power of CI/CD to provide exceptional solutions to our clients. Our use of DevOps practices ensures that our systems are always working optimally and that our clients receive the best possible service.
