Case Study: Austal achieves automated deployment and resilient container operations with Mechanical Rock

Automated delivery pipelines for container based compute deployed on ocean going vessels

Austal, a global ship builder and defence contractor, faced an aggressive timeframe to productionize the next generation of its MARINELINK-Smart vessel management system. The challenge was to automate and streamline its development and production environments on AWS ECS so its internal team could focus on delivering the core solution. They engaged vendor Mechanical Rock to implement deployment automation and improve system resilience.

Mechanical Rock automated the deployment of ECS clusters using the AWS Well-Architected Framework and built a deployment pipeline for Docker containers. The solution provided an optimized, resilient AWS environment with auto-scaling and included automated client builds for on-vessel software via Ansible. The results were a consistent, repeatable infrastructure build and extensive guidance on best practices, which increased the system's overall reliability for Austal.

Austal