Migration to Serverless Infrastructure and CI/CD Automation

Migration from the hosted to serverless infrastructure

Meetup, which historically has been a self-hosted platform, transitioned to a cloud-based infrastructure and later migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Currently, the primary infrastructure is hosted on AWS. This move enabled the utilization of AWS-managed solutions, including a cloud-based database, eliminating the need to hire extra administrators.

Later, the company opted to move away from cloud hardware management. It was decided to migrate to Amazon’s serverless computing capabilities, where applications could be packaged into containers and run on hardware without the need to handle physical servers.

This transition resulted in optimized infrastructure expenses, as maintenance, updates and direct hardware costs were reduced.

CI/CD automation and migration to serverless infrastructure

By implementing CI/CD automation and transitioning from a hosted to a serverless infrastructure, Meetup achieved several outcomes. These included simplified system configuration, enabling faster release cycles, and reducing infrastructure maintenance costs.

The adoption of CI/CD was motivated by the goals of accelerating feature delivery to production and minimizing overhead expenses associated with infrastructure. The path towards CI/CD involved moving from a self-hosted setup, with Jenkins running on a virtual machine in the customer’s office for infrastructure deployment, to utilizing GitHub Actions.

With GitHub Actions, the CI/CD process became more streamlined, eliminating the need to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Developers could now describe their deployment requirements in a declarative manner, allowing the infrastructure to execute the specified script and deploy the application.

These changes not only simplified the configuration process but also made it more accessible to individuals without prior system administration experience. Additionally, it contributed to faster deployment times eliminating the need to write complex scripts.

Business benefits

Migration from the hosted to serverless infrastructure allowed the reduction of infrastructure expenses for the client. Additionally, CI/CD automation helped to simplify system configuration, streamline the process, and ensure faster application release, ensuring lower maintenance costs.