Case Study: Transformative Enterprise Technology Solutions

Challenge/Scope

Our Department of Homeland Security (DHS) customer is transforming its citizen applicaton services culture to improve the user experience for its stakeholders. The agency needed to bridge the gap and moving from a paper-based environment to digital, while keeping pace with the continuous evolution of technology.

Approach/Solution

To address this challenge, our customer engaged Highlight and others to build a series of Development Security Operations (DevSecOps) and modernization teams. Highlight, a key prime on the program, develops, manages, and executes across multiple Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) DevSecOps teams to deliver domain-driven design, user-centered design, security, and Agile development support for the modernization of multiple systems and migration to the cloud.

Our SAFe Agile teams leveraged SecDevOps pipeline as code, continuous automation, and microservices using Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tools and containerization technologies to improve the agency’s speed and agility. Highlight built a DevSecOps CI/CD pipeline that enabled the agency to design, develop, and deploy secure critical services more quickly, impacting both citizens and internal government users.

Highlight created a detailed plan for migrating microservices from Red Hat OpenShift to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), ensuring a managed control plane with lower cost, higher reliability, availability, and built-in security and compliance against various standards. The team also migrated and rewrote on-premises Windows services to containerized, Java-based microservices in AWS, leveraging a shared CI/CD pipeline for continuous deployment and code quality scanning.

To enhance security, Highlight automated security patching using Ansible Tower, enabling our customer to quickly and automatically push updates, manage configuration, and deploy patches to both cloud and on-premise servers.

Furthermore, Highlight utilized Machine Learning to predict the completion time of forms processed, integrating a Survival Cox model into a Python Flask API hosted on a Gunicorn web server. The team used ML Flow to track model performance metrics, facilitating smoother experimentation and continuous improvement of the predictive analysis.

Capabilities

• DevSecOps
• Cloud Migration
• Integrated Security and Automation 
• Microservice Development, Migration, and Maintenance
• UI/UX
• NIST Compliance

Results/Outcomes

By leveraging the global infrastructure of AWS, our customers can now deploy applications and rapidly scale up to meet their workload requirements across the United States. The EKS control plane dynamically scales up to meet workload requirements as the cluster grows, offering flexibility in choosing managed node groups for cost-optimized compute using AWS, the customer’s VPC, and Rancher for serverless deployment.

Highlight’s design for transitioning from OpenShift to Amazon EKS has enabled our customer to manage the scheduling, discovery, and coordination of different services more effectively. This solution has resulted in an impressive $5 million in annual cost savings compared to the legacy solution.