As the prime contractor on the Halley’s COMET task order, Octo’s team of more than 140 technologists and domain experts is responsible for the development, modernization, enhancement, and operations and maintenance (O&M) of 50+ mission critical applications that provide services for more than 1.5 million external users and more than 3,000 GSA Acquisition Work Force employees with 24×7 need for availability and usability. Octo supports the modernization of GSA Halley’s COMET portfolio of applications, reducing the number of systems and eliminating dependencies while streamlining the user experience. Octo is accomplishing this as GSA transitions from a systems-based development organization to a product-based organization following DevSecOps processes using a variety of Agile tools and processes to deliver new system features, while ensuring O&M continues to be prioritized.
To improve efficiencies and security, Octo leverages CI/ CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure to deploy and operate secure applications. To improve application performance, we developed an API in GSA’s Federal Acquisition Services Cloud Services (FCS) environment built on AWS by leveraging S3 buckets. Once data is received these services send out automated notifications, extract the compressed data, and process it asynchronously. This new process significantly decreases the time it would take to load millions of rows of data manually and allows GSA to better manage their cloud costs by expanding S3 buckets only when needed.
Octo structured its teams into four portfolios each with 15 Agile teams. Each team is made up of Scrum Masters, business analysts, architects, full stack developers, user interface/ user experience (UI/UX) developers, and automation testers supporting system and software development.
We enhanced GSA’s data capabilities by building a critical application to ingest and store vendor catalogs to support GSA’s Advantage! system and the other enterprise services that rely on large sets of catalog data. The Authoritative Catalog Repository (ACR) is comprised of a set of microservices that run on Kubernetes and uses an event-driven architecture. These microservices are automatically scaled up and down horizontally through GSA’s AWS environment to handle heavy data loads
