Created during the pandemic, Detected had a big mission and needed a partner with the technical ability to act as an extension of its own team and help it to scale its vision.
months from idea to production
Releases per week instead of two a month
Month for new infrastructure to deployed
OSO took our startup prototype and turned it into a fully functioning platform and highly secure deployment in just three months. We’re so happy with the results.
Critical infrastructure component for next-generation KYB compliance.
Based in London, Detected is a business verification platform with a global client base. As a Know Your Business (KYB) platform created specifically for marketplaces, it uses advanced analytics to protect buyers and sellers from fraud using thousands of data points to determine the identity, location, solvency, and capability of a potential partner in seconds.
Prior to OSO’s involvement, Detected’s team didn’t have enough capacity or the necessary skills required to build the infrastructure needed. Detected also needed to ensure it had the necessary cyber security requirements in place. As a start-up, budget constraints meant the platform needed to be as cost-effective as possible. The team knew they had a brilliant product that could be a real game changer in the industry from the initial prototype but needed more support to turn it from an idea into a fully functioning platform.
Detected was also required by its investors to acquire a certain number of new customers to get to the next level of funding available. This meant that the project needed to be completed quickly to unlock valuable investment.
To determine the level of support that the Detected team needed, OSO held a discovery workshop using the 5D methodology. During this phase we held a series of discussions to understand the product vision, features, the platform, and technology it would be built on. In collaboration with the application developers at Ranium, the OSO team took the time to understand the scope of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in order to create a cohesive infrastructure roadmap and the skills required to deliver each component.
To achieve Detected’s tight time deadlines, it was important to get Ranium developers building side by side with the OSO team. This team would share more than just skills, they were to share how GitOps can transform application delivery, empowering developers and how the model could boost collaboration, reliability and autonomy.
Detected’s product consisted of microservices, more or less independent from one another, running on two Kubernetes clusters, for development and production. The OSO team selected Kubernetes clusters for their ease of use and availability on the AWS platform.
Following best practice OSO wanted to leverage the advantages of having a fully automated, independent delivery process for each microservice. Using GitHub actions to build a Docker image and store it in the AWS Elastic Container Registry, each development team could rapidly iterate on new features in a controlled and self container manner. Whenever a Pull Request (PR) is merged into the master branch of the source repository the GitHub Action would trigger, building the Docker image and publishing the latest changes to the AWS Elastic Container Registry.
Taking learnings from previous engagements, it is deemed best practice by the OSO team to group common manifests into a single responsibility and separate client specific deployments. This allows a relatively small skilled DevOps team to manage a large number of Kubernetes clusters across a wide range of clients, enforcing security, consistency and standardisation of repeatable components.
On the EKS cluster itself, FluxCD manages the lifecycle of Detected’s services. Flux is the main tool to facilitate GitOps, and it’s easy to install and comes with a number of other components (Source Controller, Kustomize Controller, Helm Controller and Notification Controller). A more detailed description of the ToolKit can be found here.
Flux pulls a configuration manifest like Helm or Kustomize from a private GitHub repository and applies it to a Kubernetes cluster. If there is an issue during deployment, Flux will continue to sync the current cluster state to the desired state, as defined and report back the status to the Notification Controller. To ensure only people with the correct permissions can see the cluster states, the OSO team integrated the full Role Based Access Control at the cluster level.
With the changes in place, Detected achieved a clean split between the image build and deployment processes. Flux and especially its toolkit have also lightened the cognitive load for engineers to monitor the deployment status of applications, allowing more focus on creating business value. A side benefit is that engineers are more confident about owning their services all the way to production, as they can now spot, mitigate, and fix problems in production quickly and independently.
And finally, this setup could be easily replicated as a template for new projects and services when Detected grows or when teams specialise further.
Some of the most exciting things we are proud of:
Here’s a more in-depth look at the tools we configured:
Detected was able to go from idea to production in less than three months thanks to the support it received from the OSO team. The Detected developers are now confident about the deployment process, so much so that they have increased the velocity of their updates, previously they were hitting around two per month, in August they reached 16 releases and a further seven in September 2021.
The rockstars at OSO also played an integral role in supporting the delivery of milestones to unlock further funding as the Detected customer base grew. Having the confidence and go-to-market solution ready, allowed the Detected board members to showcase the flexibility and more importantly the viability of the platform to investors. Without OSO’s involvement, it would have taken Detected longer to get its platform to market and subsequently missed time-sensitive opportunities.
As Detected CTO Peter Youell said: “OSO took our startup prototype and turned it into a fully functioning platform in just three months. We’re so happy with the results.”
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