DevOps Alpha Platoon Final Projects

Code Platoon celebrated our first DevOps and Cloud Engineering cohort’s graduation on Friday, July 21, 2023. The inaugural Immersive DevOps Alpha Platoon featured eight talented Veteran tech students ready to embark on in-demand DevOps careers. 

The students had been working diligently to gain hands-on experience and master essential DevOps skills, tools, and technologies during the program. They deployed real-world applications developed by a previous Full-stack Software Engineering cohort for their final projects. These projects provided the DevOps Alpha Platoon with practical experience and showcased the DevOps practices they learned during their Bootcamp journeys.

Here is a closer look at the two DevOps projects showcased during graduation:

GAMENIGHT

The first team deployed GAMENIGHT, a gaming event planning app developed by Romeo Platoon students. An Air Force Reservist, two Navy Veterans, and an active duty Airman worked on the GAMENIGHT DevOps team.

The GAMENIGHT team first created a multi-stage Docker build to minimize images. They also implemented a custom entry point to automate migrations before executing the Django server. 

The DevOps students leveraged the power of AWS, Kubernetes (a container management system), and Terraform (an Infrastructure as Code tool) to deploy GAMENIGHT. Finally, the team built a GitHub Actions workflow to automate the continuous integration of the Docker images and enable continuous deployment to Amazon EKS.

Romeo’s Adventure

The second team’s project deployed Romeo’s Adventure, an online game built with Django. Two Air Force Veterans, a Marine Corps Veteran, and a transitioning Soldier completed this final project.

The Romeo’s Adventure team also used Docker to build front-end and back-end images for the app. They harnessed Kubernetes to enable horizontal auto-scaling, automatically detect and replace pod failures, and effectively distribute incoming network traffic using a load balancer. 

The DevOps team managed deployments to Romeo’s Adventure via GitHub Actions. When a software engineer commits code to the app, their GitHub build automatically triggers their Docker images and applies changes with Kubectl files. An AWS dashboard monitors the web app’s performance, complete with alarms to notify the team of any health issues. Automatic database backups and EC2 instance snapshots are taken every 24 hours to ensure data safety.

The DevOps Alpha Platoon graduation ceremony and demonstrations can be seen in full on Code Platoon’s YouTube channel. Congratulations once again to the DevOps Alpha Platoon!