How we approach DevOps at Kirschbaum

In the ever-evolving environment of web development, a robust DevOps strategy is key for ensuring consistent and reliable project delivery. At Kirschbaum, our approach to DevOps for Laravel development is designed to meet the unique needs of each client, focusing on established processes, collaboration, automation, and innovation.

One size does not fit all when it comes to DevOps in consulting. We recognize that every client's needs are distinct, and our approach adapts accordingly. Whether our clients have an established DevOps team or not, we adapt our strategies to align with their existing structures and processes.

DevOps Assessment

Before executing any changes, we perform an extensive DevOps assessment in our client’s infrastructure and applications to make sure we fully understand their environment and are able to suggest improvements without breaking what’s already working.

Cloud-Agnostic

While we have a preference for AWS, our team is versatile and adept at working with any cloud provider. This flexibility allows us to accommodate our clients' preferences and optimize their Laravel (and other frameworks) applications for the cloud environment that best suits their requirements.

Our team is skilled in building custom setups using tools like Docker, Terraform, and Ansible, tailoring solutions to the specific needs of each project.

Production Environment

We are equipped to manage and deploy your Laravel application across any environment. Whether you're looking to utilize Laravel Forge for server management, Laravel Vapor for serverless deployment, Docker for containerization, or other common technologies and services, our developers have the skills and experience to set up, integrate and maintain your application, independently of the nature of your application.

Our commitment is to provide a flexible and reliable service that aligns with your specific requirements, ensuring your application runs smoothly, anywhere.

Performance and Cost Optimization

Optimizing performance and managing costs effectively stands at the heart of our DevOps services. Our methodology goes beyond deployment; it includes a strategic analysis to ensure that every aspect of your Laravel application not only performs at its peak but does so cost-efficiently.

This encompasses everything from ensuring appropriate instance sizes are established and auto-scaling is configured to prevent over-provisioning while also enabling the handling of traffic spikes without impacting performance, to ensuring Laravel routes, configurations, and events are cached, PHP is optimized, Laravel Octane was evaluated as an option and all the minor details that collectively make a significant difference.

Laravel Ecosystem

Kirschbaum is passionate about Laravel and its ecosystem, and we also leverage Laravel’s DevOps tools and services like Laravel Vapor, Laravel Forge, Laravel Envoyer and Laravel Pulse. We have configured countless applications of all sizes and complexities using these tools.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD)

Automation is at the core of our DevOps practices. We utilize GitHub Actions and other CI tools to automate repetitive tasks, run key checks like testing, linting, static analysis on every commit or pull request, automate deployments and avoiding single-developer bottlenecks, reliability, and faster delivery.

Teamwork

We always work in pairs when performing DevOps tasks in production. This way, we can help each other out, catch mistakes before they happen, and in the rare cases something goes wrong, we've got extra hands ready to fix it.

Continuous Monitoring and Alerting

To sleep well at night, having your application and infrastructure monitored 24/7 is indispensable. We use diverse tools and services to make sure we monitor all the important metrics for your project. Our go-to tools include Laravel Pulse, the ELK stack, CloudWatch, Prometheus, and Grafana, while services like NewRelic and DataDog rank high on our list of favorites.

DevSecOps and Security

Incorporating security into our DevOps practices (DevSecOps) is not an occasional activity but a fundamental aspect of our workflow at Kirschbaum. We ensure that security is embedded in our process through automation, collaboration and defined processes. We implement processes such as automatic dependency and software updates, code and secret scanning, and all of the industry best practices.

DevOps is a crucial part of any application that can't be overlooked. Your application being down can be worse than it having a critical bug. Our approach at Kirschbaum combines adaptability, automation, and a commitment to industry best practices to ensure your application is always running smoothly.