Optimizing Build Costs: Using CTO.ai Efficiently with DigitalOcean Resources

by Tola Ore-Aruwaji

Optimization of build costs and resources is a significant concern for developers, SREs, and DevOps engineers, especially in a DevOps, and application reliability where continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) are integral parts of the workflow. Using CTO.ai and DigitalOcean resources adeptly can help in achieving these goals. Let’s delve deeper into how one can optimize build costs while maintaining efficiency in the development pipeline.

CTO.ai

CTO.ai is a continuous integration and continuous deployment platform that automates the build, test, and deployment of applications. Its efficiency lies in its capability to facilitate rapid code integration and delivery, catering to teams and projects of various sizes.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider that offers cloud services to help deploy modern apps. You can create a droplet, which is a resizable computing platform with virtual servers, and manage resources in a simplified manner, or you can create other DigitalOcean resources like DigitalOcean spaces, Kubernetes resources, or container registry.

Strategies to Optimize Build Costs

Utilizing Environment Variables

Benefits

  • Ease of Configuration: With CTO.ai workflows, you can easily change configurations without altering your codebase.
  • Security: Environment variables help in safeguarding sensitive information, such as tokens and keys, by not hardcoding them in the script.

In this example below, environment variables are extensively used to store static information and secrets, such as:

env:
  static:
    - STACK_TYPE=do-k8s-cdktf
    - STACK_ENTROPY=20220921
  secrets:
    - DO_TOKEN
    - DO_SPACES_ACCESS_KEY_ID
    - DO_SPACES_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

Specific Docker Tagging

Benefits

  • Better Organization: Specific docker tagging helps in better organization and retrieval of the correct image version.
  • Better Workflow syntax: Avoids conflicts and overwrites, thus facilitating a streamlined workflow.

Code Configurations: We can use specific docker tags in our build process, which are generated using the REF environment variable:

- CLEAN_REF=$(echo "${REF}" | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/-/g' )
- docker tag one-img-to-rule-them-all:latest registry.digitalocean.com/$ORG/$REPO:$CLEAN_REF

Environment-Specific State Configurations

Benefits

  • Isolated Environments: Environment-specific state configurations allow you to maintain separate state configurations for different environments (DEV, STG, PRD), promoting isolated and safe testing environments.
  • Granular Control: Environment state configurations provide granular control over the configurations and secrets of different environments. For example, code configurations in our DigitalOcean infrastructure workflow configuration utilize separate environment-specific state configurations:
configs:
  - DEV_DO_K8S_CDKTF_STATE
  - STG_DO_K8S_CDKTF_STATE
  - PRD_DO_K8S_CDKTF_STATE


Scripted Infrastructure Setup and Deployment

Benefits

  • Automation: Automated setup and deployment with CTOai workflows reduce manual errors and save time.
  • Consistency: Our workflow deployment and setup ensures consistency across different environments by using scripts to set up and deploy infrastructure.

For example, the DigitalOcean infrastructure config utilizes scripts to manage various aspects of the infrastructure:

- run: ./node_modules/.bin/ts-node /ops/src/setup.ts
- run: ./node_modules/.bin/ts-node /ops/src/deploy.ts

Vault for Secret Management

Benefits

  • Security: Centralized secret management with CTO.ai workflows ensures higher security and controlled access to sensitive information that will be deployed to your environments (staging, development, production) later on.
  • Ease of Use: With our secret management features, it help you facilitate easy secret rotation and management through a single interface.

For example, here is a config that lets you configure and deploy your secrets directly from the ops.yml file.

- run: ./node_modules/.bin/ts-node /ops/src/vault.ts

Conclusion

These strategies derived from your DigitalOcean infrastructure and application stack configurations emphasize security, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. By incorporating these strategies, you can optimize build costs while maintaining a robust and secure CI/CD pipeline with CTO.ai.