GovEagle, a provider of services for the public sector, faced a complex and mission-critical challenge: they needed to build and operate their platform within a highly secure AWS GovCloud (US) environment to meet FedRAMP High compliance mandates. However, their expert development teams were distributed globally, including in non-compliance countries, which prevented them from directly accessing the secure GovCloud environment. This created a significant operational bottleneck, isolating their development process from their production reality and threatening to slow innovation to a crawl. The core challenge was to create a workflow that allowed global teams to develop and test with high fidelity while ensuring the production environment remained fully compliant and isolated.

2. opsZero’s Solution: Environmental Parity Through Infrastructure as Code

opsZero engineered an innovative dual-cloud strategy, creating two parallel yet nearly identical environments, managed through a unified DevOps workflow. This solution enabled seamless development in a commercial environment while ensuring compliant, high-confidence deployments to GovCloud.

The key components of this transformative solution were:

• Dual-Environment Architecture:
  • AWS GovCloud (US) Production Environment: A production environment was architected within AWS GovCloud to meet the stringent security and compliance controls of FedRAMP High.
  • AWS Commercial Development Environment: A parallel development and staging environment was built on the standard AWS Commercial cloud. This environment was functionally identical to production but accessible to GovEagle’s global development teams.
• Reusable Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform: The cornerstone of the solution was the use of Terraform modules. opsZero developed a set of reusable, parameterized modules to define the entire infrastructure stack. This allowed for the consistent and repeatable deployment of both environments with only a minimal delta in configuration (e.g., region endpoints, specific security controls), ensuring high fidelity between development and production.
• High-Performance Compute for GenAI Workloads: Both environments were built around Amazon EKS clusters. To power GovEagle’s Generative AI and Vector Database workloads, the clusters were provisioned with Amazon EC2 instances equipped with Nvidia GPU chips, providing the necessary high-performance compute.
• Intelligent, Workload-Based Scaling: To manage the costs of powerful GPU instances effectively, opsZero implemented an advanced auto-scaling strategy. Instead of scaling on simple metrics like CPU, the EKS cluster scaling is dynamically tied to a core business metric: the daily load of documents processed. This ensures compute resources are provisioned precisely when needed, optimizing both performance and cost.
• Unified CI/CD Pipeline: A CI/CD pipeline (using GitHub Actions) was created to bridge the two environments. Code developed and tested against the commercial cloud environment could be promoted through the pipeline for a secure, automated deployment to the isolated GovCloud EKS cluster, using the same container artifacts and deployment logic.
• Comprehensive Security and Monitoring Across Both Clouds:
  • AWS CloudTrail and AWS CloudWatch were rigorously implemented in both the commercial and GovCloud environments. This provided a complete, correlated view of API activity, logs, and metrics, ensuring consistent governance, security monitoring, and operational observability across the entire development-to-production lifecycle.
  • Amazon GuardDuty was enabled in both accounts for intelligent threat detection.

3. Customer Impact: Unlocking Global Talent for a Secure Market

The dual-cloud DevOps model designed by opsZero was not just a technical solution; it was a fundamental business enabler for GovEagle.

• Enabled Core Business Model: GovEagle can now confidently pursue and serve customers in the highly regulated public sector market requiring FedRAMP High compliance, a market that would have been inaccessible otherwise.
• High-Confidence, High-Velocity Deployments: Because the development environment mirrors production so closely, code that passes testing in the commercial cloud can be deployed to GovCloud with extremely high confidence. The automated CI/CD pipeline makes this process fast, repeatable, and secure.
• Significant Cost Optimization: The intelligent, workload-driven scaling for the EKS clusters ensures that expensive GPU resources are used efficiently, minimizing waste and reducing the total cost of ownership for their AI-driven platform.
• Streamlined Compliance and Auditing: The consistent application of security controls and comprehensive logging across both environments via IaC and tools like CloudTrail makes auditing and demonstrating FedRAMP compliance a manageable, continuous process rather than a periodic scramble.

Through this advanced DevOps transformation, opsZero provided GovEagle with a secure, scalable, and cost-effective platform that solved their core operational paradox, allowing them to innovate globally while delivering services securely to one of the world’s most demanding regulatory environments.