Swinburne wanted to improve access to the Ceph storage in a number of ways:

Swinburne had identified a few candidate products that might fulfill their requirements, but had not looked at each in any great depth due to internal resourcing constraints.

Aptira first undertook an evaluation of four candidate storage applications. We rapidly deployed each application in an environment within Swinburne so the features and functionality of each could be compared. We produced a detailed evaluation report that allowed Swinburne to make an informed decision about which application to move forward with. Two leading candidates were put forward by Aptira and those deployments were converted into a larger-scale proof-of-concept that included integration with the actual Ceph storage so Swinburne staff and IT services team could get a feel for using each application.

The Nextcloud application was eventually chosen as it met the majority of their user and business requirements. From here Aptira developed a comprehensive solution architecture, paying particular concern to high availability and the ability to scale as the user base increased.

According to the solution architecture, Aptira deployed:

Kubernetes was selected as the container orchestration platform due to its self-healing and scaling capabilities, and its ability to simplify application deployment and configuration. While the Nextcloud community provides a pre-built container image, it was not suitable for a multi-node production deployment, so we developed a custom image using the existing image as a base.

Maintainability was a significant concern for Swinburne so we ensured that all components of the architecture were deployed using Ansible to eliminate any manual steps in the deployment. We integrated our Ansible work into Swinburne’s existing Ansible Tower deployment, creating job templates so that deployments could be triggered from the Tower server. Since all of our work was being stored in Git on Swinburne’s GitLab server, we also created CICD pipelines to both build the Nextcloud container image and to trigger deployment to their test and production environments via Ansible Tower. During handover, Swinburne IT staff were able to deploy changes to the test environment by simply committing code to the repository.

Finally, we worked with ITSM staff to integrate the new service into Swinburne’s self-service portal, so users can request access to storage and make changes to their allocated quota.

Swinburne staff now have a stable and performant web-based storage service where they can upload, manage and share on-premises data.

As the uptake of the service increases, IT staff also have the confidence that the service can be scaled out to handle the increasing interest from users.

By recommending applications with an external API, Aptira made sure that Swinburne’s ITSM system would easily integrate with Nextcloud and satisfy Swinburne’s requirement to have a single pane of glass for all user service requests. With ITSM integration, Swinburne IT have also gained a charge-back capability to recover costs from other departments.

The solution was built with 100% open source components, reducing vendor lock-in.

While Aptira is happy to recommend and deploy greenfield DevOps infrastructure to support a company’s CICD needs, this project showed that we can also customise our solutions to fit in with our customers’ existing DevOps infrastructure, configuring a complete deployment pipeline for provisioning the entire solution.