Disposable SharePoint Farm Infrastructure
- Dates: Feb 2018 to Aug 2018
- Role: Architect, Team Lead
- Team Size: 5
Project Goals
Our 5-member team was deployed to our client’s site with the brief to design, implement and deliver a fully-automated SharePoint Server Farm on Azure.
Infrastructure-as-Code was a key deliverable, i.e. the following tasks were fully automated:
- Networks Provisioning
- Provisioning of all VMs, Disks, NICs, Security Groups and related resources in Azure
- Configuring SQL Server Databases and High Availability
- SharePoint Services and Web-Apps Configuration
- Configuration of firewall rules for Barracuda WAF and Azure Traffic Manager
- Infrastructure Validation against compliance requirements.
Context
- The client used Sharepoint Server for many of their critical business processes, and were embarking on an Azure migration.
- Their existing provisioning process was highly manual, involving 48+ hours of manual provisioning by a consultant.
- End-to-end automation would have the potential to save time, cost (consultant fees) and minimize risk due to human error.
Tools Used
Key Activities
Drove Recruiting
The team was hired and upskilled in anticipation of this project. As a senior team-member, I helped drive the recruiting, interviewing and upskilling activities. Given that Agility Roots was a new firm, I also created a bespoke interviewing process and programming assignment to help narrow down the most suitable candidates.
Upskilled the Team
Once the team was recruited and in place, I identified gaps in their skillsets and conducted weekend hacking sessions to upskill the team, as well as build camaraderie. This went a long way toward our collective success in delivering a complex project.
Key Impact
- Designed and implemented a fully automated process to deliver an HA SharePoint Farm on Azure.
- Delivered 10 environments with 70 servers and a high degree of reliability.
- The entire process from scratch took only 8 hours per environment.