CCMI

Enhancing Cloud Operations for Concussion Care

CCMI, a concussion care company with a small team and tight budget, was manually setting up and deploying AWS infrastructure, creating inefficiency and risk. Ollon automated CCMI's production and staging environments with Terraform and built CI/CD pipelines, then stayed on as fractional DevOps support. CCMI has run on that automated infrastructure since 2022, with faster deployments and fewer errors.

Situation

Complete Concussions Management Inc. (CCMI) reached out to Ollon for support as they faced challenges in managing AWS infrastructure. With a small team and budget constraints, they used manual processes for setting up and deploying applications in the cloud, leading to inefficiencies and potential errors.

Solution

CCMI approached Ollon for assistance in automating their AWS production and staging environments using Terraform. Additionally, they sought to establish CI/CD pipelines for streamlined build deployment and automated testing. Ollon provided fractional DevOps support, offering expertise as needed for modifications and troubleshooting, effectively acting as an extension of CCMI's team.

Results

Implementing automated cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines significantly enhanced CCMI's operational efficiency and reliability. They experienced reduced deployment times and minimized errors, leading to improved overall application stability. Ollon's ongoing DevOps support ensured that CCMI could swiftly address modifications and troubleshoot issues as they arose, supporting their growth and innovation in managing concussion care solutions effectively.

Technologies

Terraform, AWS, Bitbucket, Docker, Rails

Our Expertise in Action

Infrastructure as code

CCMI ran its AWS environments through a small DevOps footprint, but that meant configuration changes only got made and documented when someone actually needed something changed. Ollon manages CCMI's staging and production infrastructure through Terraform, applying scheduled tasks, cron jobs, and environment variable changes as code, and refining the underlying IAM policies for the accounts used in deployment so access stays scoped to exactly what each automated process needs. That approach means every infrastructure change to CCMI's environment is reviewed and tracked before it goes live, not discovered after the fact.

AWS

CCMI's application originally ran on Elastic Beanstalk, a setup that limited how much control the team had over the underlying infrastructure as the platform grew. Ollon migrated the application to ECS, later added Lambda@Edge caching at the CDN layer after testing on staging, and set up Metabase for CCMI's own analytics needs with access scoped specifically for that reporting. Those infrastructure changes gave CCMI more control over its environment and better performance for end users, without disrupting the application already running on top of it.

Fractional DevOps support

CCMI never needed a full time DevOps hire, but still needed someone who could handle infrastructure work reliably whenever something came up, from a broken API timeout to a routine tool upgrade. Ollon has provided that ongoing fractional support since 2022, covering everything from routine code changes and platform upgrades to hands on troubleshooting when something more serious surfaced. That flexibility meant CCMI paid for DevOps expertise only when it actually needed it, without carrying the cost or hiring overhead of a dedicated infrastructure role, and the relationship has continued for years because that on demand model kept working for both sides.

Backup and disaster recovery

CCMI had never formally documented what would happen if its production environment went down or its data needed to be restored, leaving that plan to exist only in whoever happened to remember the infrastructure at the time. Ollon built out a disaster recovery document covering CCMI's environment, then revised it based on the client's own feedback to make sure it reflected how the infrastructure actually worked. Having that plan written down means a recovery scenario has a defined starting point instead of being figured out from scratch under pressure. That documentation is now part of what keeps CCMI's environment recoverable, not just running.

Bitbucket

CCMI's development workflow ran through Bitbucket, and letting that platform fall behind on updates risked losing support and running into compatibility issues elsewhere in the pipeline. Ollon handled the Bitbucket upgrade along with a related jumphost access issue that surfaced around the same time, keeping the development platform current without disrupting the team's day to day workflow. That kind of routine platform maintenance is easy to defer indefinitely without someone responsible for actually doing it. Having a fractional role dedicated to exactly this kind of upkeep meant it got done as regular maintenance instead of becoming a problem later.