When deadlines loom, complexity rises, and compliance can’t be compromised, even the most experienced teams can hit a wall. That’s exactly where BCT Partners found themselves during their work on the AHEAD HIV project for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS).

BCT was no stranger to high-stakes federal contracts. But deploying a Drupal CMS-based site securely into AWS—complete with dev, stage, and production environments, automated CI/CD pipelines, and airtight security—proved to be a far more demanding task than expected. After months of effort, progress was slow, and deployment remained elusive.

That’s when BCT turned to DevPanel.

What happened next? In just 17 minutes, DevPanel did what had previously taken two engineers more than two months of manual work—unsuccessfully. The transformation was immediate, and the results were undeniable.

🧩 The Project: AHEAD.HIV.gov

The AHEAD (America’s HIV Epidemic Analysis Dashboard) initiative aims to equip public health professionals and policymakers with the data they need to combat HIV effectively. It’s a government-backed, high-visibility project that demands speed, reliability, and security—without compromise.

As a subcontractor on the project, BCT Partners was responsible for:

• Setting up secure development and staging environments in AWS
  
• Automating CI/CD workflows for quick iteration
  
• Promoting staged releases to production with confidence
  
• Maintaining compliance with federal-level security standards
  

The platform itself was being built on Drupal CMS—a natural choice for government-grade content management—but the infrastructure challenges that came with it nearly derailed development timelines.

⚠️ The Bottleneck: Manual DevOps and AWS Complexity

Despite having two technically capable engineers assigned to the task, BCT Partners found themselves struggling for over two months trying to:

• Configure AWS resources manually
  
• Secure the environments for compliance
  
• Build a working CI/CD pipeline
  
• Enable safe and automated deployments from stage to production
  

No matter how hard they worked, something was always off—security holes, pipeline errors, missing permissions, configuration drift. Progress was slow and fragile. And time was running out.

🧪 The Turning Point: DevPanel’s 17-Minute Demo

During their first meeting with the DevPanel team, BCT’s engineers watched quietly—but they were also timing the demo.

They had to see it to believe it.

By the end of that brief call, DevPanel had:

• Spun up fully configured Dev, Stage, and Prod environments in AWS
  
• Applied pre-hardened security templates ready for compliance
  
• Connected Git-based CI/CD pipelines for seamless deployments
  
• Enabled automated promotions from staging to production
  

The entire stack was built, secured, and operational in under 20 minutes.

“You did in 17 minutes what we couldn’t do in five man-months.”

They signed with DevPanel that same day.

✅ What DevPanel Delivered

1. Instant Infrastructure-as-Code

DevPanel’s platform handled what previously took weeks of Terraform, CloudFormation, and CLI troubleshooting. With a few inputs, their DevOps automation engine provisioned:

• Secure Kubernetes clusters
  
• Scalable Drupal-optimized environments
  
• Database and storage integrations
  
• Domain routing and HTTPS configuration
  

2. CI/CD Pipelines that Just Work

DevPanel didn’t stop at infrastructure. They worked directly with BCT to:

• Create Git-integrated CI/CD pipelines
  
• Write and optimize deployment scripts
  
• Establish automated approvals and rollbacks
  
• Ensure reproducibility across environments
  

3. Built-in Security and Compliance

Security wasn’t an afterthought—it was built into every layer. DevPanel delivered pre-configured environments with:

• Encrypted traffic and secrets management
  
• Role-based access controls
  
• Compliance-ready configurations
  
• Integrated monitoring and alerts
  

4. On-Demand DevOps Support

Since BCT’s team didn’t have deep AWS expertise, DevPanel became their DevOps support partner, helping with:

• AWS troubleshooting and best practices
  
• Pipeline debugging and improvements
  
• Production readiness checks
  
• Ongoing incident and performance support
  

📈 The Results

Challenge	DevPanel Solution
Manual AWS setup	1-click provisioning with security best practices
CI/CD complexity	Auto-generated, customizable deployment pipelines
Security and compliance configuration	Pre-hardened environments, out-of-the-box
Lack of DevOps expertise	DevPanel operated as an extension of BCT’s team
Risk of failed production releases	Safe, GitOps-driven promotion process

⏱ 95% Faster Time to Deployment

What took BCT’s engineers months of guesswork and patchwork, DevPanel delivered in under 20 minutes—with no stress, no rework, and no risk of configuration errors.

🔐 Security and Compliance: Built In

DevPanel’s baked-in security settings not only saved BCT weeks of configuration—they also ensured the entire stack was compliance-ready from day one.

🧠 Less Time on Infrastructure, More Time on Features

With DevPanel handling the heavy lifting, BCT’s developers could focus on building features and serving the mission of AHEAD, rather than wrestling with DevOps hurdles.

🧭 Why It Matters

In today’s cloud-native world, organizations can’t afford to spend weeks configuring environments or reinventing DevOps best practices from scratch—especially not on high-impact government or enterprise projects.

BCT’s experience with DevPanel highlights a powerful truth: the right DevOps platform doesn’t just make life easier—it can save your project.

If you’re managing a project on AWS (or want to), building with Drupal, or struggling with CI/CD and security automation, this story is your proof that there’s a better way.

📥 Download the Full Case Study

Want to dive deeper into how BCT scaled faster with DevPanel?

👉 Download the Full Case Study PDF

🤝 Need Help on a Similar Project?

Whether you’re migrating to AWS, building a Drupal platform, or setting up your CI/CD pipelines, we’d love to show you how DevPanel can help. Our platform empowers your developers with secure, scalable, and production-ready cloud environments—without needing to be AWS experts.
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