About Top Echelon
Top Echelon provides recruitment software and services to streamline hiring. Their flagship product offers tools for applicant tracking, job posting, and candidate management, tailored for staffing agencies. They also offer recruitment training and consulting to help companies improve performance and strategies. ​
Situation Â
Top Echelon faced significant challenges following a series of acquisitions, which left them with multiple AWS accounts, disparate infrastructure patterns, and varying CI/CD platforms. This fragmentation led to inconsistent software deployments and infrastructure between lower and upper environments. Developers struggled with limited visibility into the metrics and logs of their running applications, causing severe over-provisioning of resources and resulting in several client-impacting issues. Additionally, the need for multiple VPN connections to support various business units added complexity, while costly and unreliable sandbox environments led to lost QA time and hindered development efficiency.Â
Action
Centroid implemented a multi-tenant Kubernetes environment on AWS, tailored to support various business units. This consolidated the fragmented infrastructure into a single AWS account, unified VPN, and centralized Gitlab instance. Centroid also created standardized CI/CD pipelines in Gitlab for all applications, integrating essential tools like Vault, Istio, Prometheus, and Helm Charts. Additionally, Centroid implemented dynamic Gitlab runners on Kubernetes using Karpenter and built a standard pipeline to deploy sandbox environments on demand with automated testing, significantly improving efficiency and consistency across the organization.Â
Impact
Centroid’s efforts led to significant improvements for Top Echelon. Developers are now able to work seamlessly across multiple business unit applications, thanks to standardized CI/CD pipelines and a unified portal for accessing metrics and logs. The cost of sandbox environments was significantly reduced, and their availability greatly increased. Additionally, operations resources can now access all environments through a single VPN client and connection, streamlining workflows and enhancing overall efficiency.Â