Enterprise Customers and DevOps - Bridging the gap

DevOps is not a goal, but a never-ending process of continuous development - Jez Humble. DevOps has been the catalyst in helping businesses implement a continuous integration and continuous delivery process. The best part about DevOps is its openness for implementation for organizations at any sizes and levels. Any organization irrespective of their size and domain can implement DevOps cycle to work towards improving the speed and quality of their delivery.

The story of implementing a DevOps process for a CPG giant

One of our clients is a global CPG giant operating in different parts of the world. Their online commerce is driven by a large quantity of personalized content, implying they had multiple digital assets serving each of their regional markets. We defined a clear DevOps process for the customer by customizing the workflow to address the goals of the customer.

The Need for a DevOps solution

The client had web properties in multiple markets and geographies with each market-specific feature enhancements done periodically. The client was unhappy with the time to market for each feature upgrades. A proper process to deployments and feature commits was the need of the hour to stabilize the workflow and increase the efficiency.

Implementing the Solution

Ameex was taking care of the development, deployment, and Maintenance of the client's web properties. Since we knew the entire process cycle and they were handled mostly internally, it was easy for us to draft a solution that will help the customer's needs.

We designed and followed a Global code library that will help the customer localize to different regional markets in one-third of the initial development time. The initial platform was launched to the Canadian market post which our Maintenance and Support team handled the localization to their different markets.

To further reduce the time to market, our expert team of technical architects, solutions consultants, and Chief developers framed a workflow to automate deployment activities and provide quick time to market.

We faced a challenge since the ecosystem was complex involving multiple crews for development, maintenance, review etc. After a series of discussions and test runs, we defined a clear process to follow for continuous development and deployment.

We introduced Continuous Integration and Continuous delivery approach using Jenkins and we deployed test automation using Selenium.

We had respective work environments for hotfix (that will be directly deployed to the live stage for immediate fixes), Production (used for NPD), Production 2 (testing of the newly developed features in an agile workflow) etc.

Results of DevOps deployment

Releases to the live environment were made on-demand. This was a result of the decrease in development efforts by 74%

The platform availability rose up to 99.99% making it open to test and configure scalable options such as Personalization, Chatbots, AMP, PWA, Customer Journey analytics and more.

The CI/CD approach is backed by a continuous monitoring team, any discrepancies are fixed at the root during its initial phase. This brought down the frequency of defects.

The time to market is the revelation point of this process, with the same improving by 3X!

The team cohesion improved since the entire process is an integrated and inter-dependent approach.