DevOps Consulting in Perth — CI/CD, GitLab & Ansible

Nano Solutions sets up and runs the delivery pipeline behind your software: CI/CD, automated testing, zero-downtime deployments and servers managed as code. Fremantle-based senior engineers since 2013, and a WA Government CUAICTS2021 ICT panel supplier (Contractor #225). We use the same pipeline for our own products and client platforms every day.

What DevOps means for a business our size

Most Perth organisations don't need a platform-engineering team or a Kubernetes cluster. They need code that reaches production safely and repeatably, without one person who "knows how to deploy". In practice that comes down to four things. Every change is built and tested automatically. Releases happen with one click, or one tag, and can be rolled back. Servers are configured from code rather than by hand. And someone gets alerted before your customers notice a problem.

Signs your delivery pipeline needs work

• Only one person can deploy. If they're on leave, releases wait. If they leave, nobody knows how it works.
• Releases happen after hours because they take the site down, or because something usually breaks.
• Deploying means copying files to a server over FTP or SSH, or running a list of commands from a wiki page.
• Nobody is sure what's on production, or whether staging matches it.
• Server passwords and API keys are shared in chat or sit in the repository.
• You find out about outages from customers rather than from an alert.
• A previous vendor set it up, and the documentation left with them.

Two or more of these usually means a short audit will pay for itself in the first incident it prevents.

What we set up

• CI/CD pipelines: GitLab CI or GitHub Actions that build, test, scan and deploy on every merge. We maintain shared pipeline templates, so new projects start from a version that already works.
• Zero-downtime deployments: atomic releases with Deployer for PHP/Laravel, or containers with Docker. Every release can be rolled back in seconds.
• Staging and branch previews: a staging environment that tracks your main branch, production released from a version tag, and preview environments for feature branches so stakeholders can review before anything ships.
• Infrastructure as code: servers built and hardened with Ansible, so a rebuild is a playbook run, not a week of guesswork. Terraform where your cloud provider calls for it.
• Self-hosted Git and runners: GitLab on infrastructure you own, with your source code and build secrets kept in Australia.
• Monitoring and alerting: uptime, error tracking and server metrics with alerts routed to the right person.
• Security in the pipeline (DevSecOps): dependency and secret scanning, least-privilege deploy credentials, and patching aligned to the Essential Eight.

Tools we work with

• Source control and CI/CD: GitLab (hosted or self-managed) and GitHub Actions. Not sure which to use? We compare them in GitLab vs GitHub for Australian businesses.
• Deployments: Deployer for atomic PHP and Laravel releases, Docker and Docker Compose for containers.
• Configuration and infrastructure: Ansible and Terraform.
• Hosting: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Proxmox and on-premises Linux.
• Monitoring: uptime checks, application error tracking and server metrics, with alerts to email, Slack or phone.

We pick the simplest set that does the job and that your team can maintain. We'd rather hand you a pipeline you understand than an impressive one nobody can change.

How an engagement runs

• Audit: we review how code gets from a developer's laptop to production today. That covers repositories, build steps, environments, secrets, backups and who holds the keys.
• Plan: a short written plan that puts the riskiest manual steps first, with a fixed price for the setup work.
• Build: pipelines, environments and playbooks set up alongside your team. We document them and hand them over in your repositories, not ours.
• Run, or hand over: either your team owns it from there, or we keep it patched, monitored and current as part of managed Linux infrastructure.

Built for software we also write

We're a software house first. We write Laravel and custom software, and we run the pipelines that ship it. When a deployment breaks, the people fixing the pipeline can read the application code too. That matters most when you're taking over a system from another vendor, which is often where a project rescue starts.

Open tools, no lock-in, Australian data

We build on open-source tooling you can keep using if you part ways with us: GitLab, Ansible, Docker, Deployer and Proxmox. Your source code, pipelines and credentials can stay on Australian infrastructure you control. For government and regulated clients, that keeps data sovereignty intact across the whole delivery chain.