National Gallery of Victoria
This project involved transitioning a client’s coding repositories from an in-house server to a cloud-based platform, leveraging Azure DevOps. The objective was to enhance security and simplify the software development and release process using Azure’s automated tools and features.
Additionally, the project included setting up a comprehensive environment for multiple websites, which served as a foundation for development, staging, and production. This setup incorporated essential components such as databases, storage, and web application services, offering a scalable and secure platform.
Finally, the integration of Azure DevOps pipelines was implemented to facilitate automatic workflows for building, testing, and deploying code (known as Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment or CI/CD). This enabled quicker updates to the websites while ensuring high standards of code quality and reliability.
We chose to build these environments using Platform as a Service (PaaS) resources to leverage the inherent scalability, flexibility, and efficiency they offer. PaaS allows for rapid development and deployment without the overhead of managing underlying infrastructure, enabling teams to focus on coding and innovation. Additionally, using PaaS enhances security features and provides built-in tools for monitoring and maintenance, ensuring a robust and reliable environment. This approach not only reduces operational costs but also allows for seamless updates and integrations.
We chose to use Bicep for infrastructure as code to define and deploy the entire environment’s resources due to its simplicity and clarity. Bicep offers a modular approach to managing complex infrastructure, making it easier for us to maintain and update configurations. By utilising Bicep, we automated the deployment of essential components like networking, app services, Azure Front Door, managed identities, and databases, ensuring consistency and reducing human error. Ultimately, using Bicep fosters a more efficient, reliable, and scalable deployment process while enhancing collaboration through its easily readable and version-controlled code.
