Standardizing Pharma Enterprise CI/CD Deployments with AWS

Situation

A pharmaceutical enterprise – managing multiple applications faced growing complexity in application deployments across development, testing, and production environments. Releases were handled manually on cloud-hosted virtual machines, resulting in long deployment cycles, inconsistent configurations, and operational risk.

As application portfolios expanded and delivery expectations increased, the organization required a standardized, repeatable deployment approach that could improve speed, reliability, and scalability while maintaining strong security and governance controls on AWS.

Problem

• Manual deployments leading to long release cycles and frequent configuration errors
• Inconsistent application behavior across environments due to lack of containerization
• Limited automation for testing, code quality, and security validation
• Production downtime during releases impacting user experience and SLAs
• Difficulty scaling deployment processes across multiple applications and teams

Solution

• Designed a standardized CI/CD framework leveraging AWS-native infrastructure
• Implemented automated build and integration workflows using GitHub Actions
• Integrated automated code quality and security scans using SonarQube
• Containerized applications with Docker to ensure consistency across environments
• Deployed containerized workloads on AWS EC2 with automated health checks
• Enabled secure traffic routing, SSL termination, and scalability using Nginx
• Established a repeatable, secure, and scalable deployment model applicable across applications

Impact

• 60% reduction in deployment time, cutting release cycles from several hours to under two hours end-to-end
• 90% decrease in deployment-related errors through automation and standardized configurations
• Increased release frequency from bi-weekly cycles to multiple releases per week
• Reduced production downtime during deployments to under 5 minutes per release
• Improved application resilience, enabling the platform to handle 2x traffic spikes without performance degradation
• Faster recovery from failures, reducing restoration time from hours to less than 15 minutes