PhoneBurner and DoiT’s deploy a Blue/Green strategy to increase reliability and uptime during software updates
Meet PhoneBurner
Learn how PhoneBurner and DoiT used a Blue/Green deployment strategy to maintain uptime and reliability during software updates.
PhoneBurner is a powerful sales acceleration platform designed to help onsite and remote sales teams increase productivity and efficiency. With its advanced features and capabilities, the solution is available from any web browser or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) softphone. PhoneBurner’s Power Dialer streamlines the lead management process making it easier for sales reps to reduce admin time and accelerate their pipeline conversion. This cloud-based software is ideal for small and medium-sized businesses looking to optimize their sales efforts and improve their ROI. With a valuable reporting feature and vast leading CRM solutions integrations, PhoneBurner helps customers automate their sales tasks, track their progress, and achieve their sales goals.
The Challenge
To ensure high availability of its service to an extensive global customer base, PhoneBurner initially deployed its system on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and used Jenkins for continuous delivery. PhoneBurner wanted to reduce downtime caused by architectural constraints during software rollouts. DoiT’s Customer Reliability Engineers (CREs) focused on finding a solution to improve platform reliability and minimize downtime during software updates.
The Solution
After conducting a comprehensive analysis of PhoneBurner’s uptime challenges during software updates, DoiT concluded that a blue/green deployment strategy would be the most appropriate solution. To do so, the PhoneBurner team planned to deploy new servers with the updated version of the application (the “green” environment) alongside existing servers running the older version (the “blue” environment). With this approach, traffic would be gradually diverted to the new servers as they were tested and proven stable and reliable.
DoiT created custom solutions to tackle the challenges of implementing the blue/green approach, including unique application constraints and gaps in native ECS strategies. To optimize the use of ECS and Jenkins, DoiT’s CREs developed a Terraform- and Jenkins-pipeline–based solution to overcome these blockers and facilitate the blue/green deployment strategy.
In parallel, the team also implemented automated testing for the green environment to ensure it was functioning correctly before diverting traffic. The team also integrated this testing process into the existing deployment pipeline to orchestrate a seamless traffic cutover to the new servers.
By implementing this customized solution, PhoneBurner successfully deployed software updates without compromising the availability of its platform. The Blue/Green deployment strategy and automated testing process provided a reliable and efficient solution for maintaining uptime during updates.
The Results
Thanks to this resilient architecture, PhoneBurner can seamlessly deploy software updates without compromising uptime. Additionally, DoiT helped PhoneBurner optimize its use of ECS and Jenkins to achieve better performance and reliability, reducing the planned-maintenance window by 75%. PhoneBurner also saved an estimated 14 hours per month of manual administration through pipeline automation.