Cutting Deployment Times by 50% and Infrastructure Costs by 30% with Devops

DevOps Case Study Results 

• Faster time to market, 50% reduction
  in deployment time
• Refactored cloud architecture
• 30% reduction in infrastructure
  costs
• 30-40% less time in CI/CD pipeline,
  getting to a one-click deployment
• Team oversees 15+ applications,
  all productive
• Database migration of 400 million
  records  

Executive Summary

Our client, a global geolocation company with offices in the US and Europe, wanted to adopt DevOps but was finding it challenging to staff and scale their fast-paced projects locally. Rather than outsource their DevOps adoption through a traditional, vendor-client outsourcing relationship, the client leveraged Perficient Latin America’s DevOps capabilities by creating hybrid teams, allowing them to realize the benefits of shorter development cycles, faster response times, and a more collaborative work environment.

Tech Stack

Jenkins / Terraform / AWS / CentOS 7 / Docker / Python-Bash-Groovy / Chef / Git / Jira / Confluence

Background

The client, an innovative geolocation company with nearly 10,000 employees from around the globe and offices in the US and Europe, provides top-of-the-line location services to companies and final users through high-definition maps of more than 50 countries. Our client’s goal is to expand the breadth and reach of location services worldwide by providing end users with complex layers of data updated in real-time.

For the client, DevOps adoption was key. They were looking to increase their productivity, optimize processes and enjoy a stronger collaborative work environment through DevOps, but were finding it hard to staff and scale their fast-paced projects locally. Because a fully-outsourced DevOps adoption is not feasible, the client knew they had to enhance their internal capabilities with a third-party vendor, though not through a traditional outsourcing relationship.?

Challenge 

In 2016, the client chose to expand their team with Perficient Latin America because of we offered the best cost to value balance, time zone and cultural alignment, extensive DevOps experience and a flexible approach towards agile values and principles instead of a one size fits all approach.

The new hybrid team, composed of both client and Perficient Latin America DevOps engineers, faced more than just technical challenges. Implementing a DevOps mindset at a company requires cultural change, strong communication, and integrated teams to break down silos. Additional challenges included excessive wait times for approval and inefficiencies in filing tickets, writing documentation, applying parameters, etc., combined with high infrastructure costs and convoluted pipelines, which resulted in lost time and a sluggish process moving from a local machine to production.

Solution

Initially, the Perficient Latin America team started by getting acquainted with the systems and completing application or configuration changes. By leveraging automation tools such as AWS, Python, Git, Terraform, Jenkins and Docker, and understanding the full pipeline, the Perficient Latin America team identified bottlenecks and remedied them quickly, overall reducing deployment times by 50%.

The deployed Perficient Latin America DevOps engineers also worked transversally to observe, identify, and correct practices when needed. Each engineer had a complete understanding of the entire ecosystem and processes and was able to navigate between applications seamlessly.

By optimizing the type of resources used, the team was able to cut down infrastructure costs. The team dockerized the deployment and incorporated it to the continuous integration system . This allowed them to automate the deletion of resources no longer in use and cut costs by 30%.

The team achieved a one-click deployment using several Jenkins pipelines. They implemented Infrastructure as Code (IaC), gathering all deployment scripts in the same repositories as the source code alongside the parameters for Jenkins to deploy in every environment. This enabled them to activate the entire deployment process, which included compiling, executing unit tests, creating deployment artifacts and Docker images, publishing them to an artifact repository manager, deploying the developed infrastructure, executing acceptance tests and eliminating the created resources if the tests passed, with just the click of a button.

PSL’s DevOps Transversal Capability Group provided additional value by supporting the hybrid team with cumulative experience, best practices, and expertise from the whole Perficient Latin America community, not just the contracted team.

Once a solid relationship was established, the client found in Perficient Latin America a knowledgeable, trustworthy collaborator that helped them to improve and expand their adoption of DevOps.

___________

Ready to accelerate your DevOps adoption? Call Perficient Latin America today.