An overview of the client

A rapidly expanding SaaS provider, TechInnovate offers enterprise workflow automation solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients in a variety of industries. Since its founding in 2015, the business has grown quickly, going from a startup with just one product to a corporation with 180 workers and a suite of interconnected applications that serve more than 500 clients. Reliability and performance are crucial components of their value proposition because their flagship platform manages important business operations for clients.

The Problem

Early in 2021, TechInnovate came to us because they were having serious problems with their software delivery process, which was affecting their team morale and company performance:

• Slow Release Cycles: They were at a competitive disadvantage because it took an average of 12 weeks for new features to go from development to production.
• Reliability Problems: Customers' trust in the platform was being impacted by an average of three to four major production issues each month.
• Siloed Teams: Operations, QA, and development all operated independently with disparate goals and inadequate communication.
• Manual Procedures: The majority of the deployment and testing procedures were manual, labor-intensive, and prone to errors.
• Technical Debt: Due to pressure to produce features, technical debt has risen and became more challenging to manage.
• Expandability Problems: The platform's performance was deteriorating as its user base increased. The platform was having scaling problems and performance deterioration as its user base increased.
• Developer Experience: Long feedback cycles and inconsistent environments irritated developers, which made retention difficult.

When a significant release that had been planned for months had to be turned back because of performance problems that weren't discovered during testing, the situation reached a breaking point. "That was our wake-up call," says Jason Chen, CTO at TechInnovate. "We came to the realization that our delivery procedure was actually endangering our company rather than merely slowing us down. Instead of developing the features our consumers required, we were spending more time battling fires.

Our Method

We created a comprehensive DevOps transformation plan that would tackle organizational and technological issues following a careful evaluation of TechInnovate's technical environment, procedures, and culture:

Phase 1: Quick Wins and Foundation (3 months)

To gain momentum, we started by laying the groundwork for DevOps while achieving a few small victories:

• CI/CD Pipeline: For the core application, a continuous integration and delivery pipeline was put into place.
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform was used to convert infrastructure configuration to code, allowing for consistent environment construction.
• Automated Testing: included performance, integration, and unit testing into the CI/CD process.
• Observability and Monitoring: Implemented thorough alerting and monitoring throughout the application stack.
• DevOps Team Structure: Teams were restructured into cross-functional product teams that were accountable from beginning to end.

It took a lot of work to get beyond the early resistance and technological difficulties at this phase. "There was definitely skepticism at first," says Sarah Johnson, Lead for DevOps. "Failed process adjustments in the past have burned several team members. To gain credibility, we had to show tangible progress right away.

Phase 2 of the DevOps Team Collaboration: Process and Culture Change (four months)

After establishing the technology framework, we concentrated on changing procedures and culture to completely adopt DevOps principles:

• Agile Transformation: To increase visibility and collaboration, Scrum was implemented using two-week sprints and daily standups.
• Feature Flags: To enable safer, incremental rollouts and isolate deployment from release, feature flag capabilities were implemented.
• Incident Management: Developed an organized procedure for incident management that includes blameless postmortems.
• Knowledge Sharing: To dismantle knowledge silos, pair programming, tech lectures, and documentation standards were put into place.
• Metrics and Visibility: To promote improvement, dashboards displaying important DevOps metrics (such as deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, etc.) were created.

Leadership alignment and cultural change needed a lot of attention during this phase. As stated by Vice President of Engineering Michael Rodriguez, "the technical changes were actually easier than the cultural ones," "We had to drastically alter how teams collaborated and how we determined success. That required overcoming certain deeply rooted routines and perspectives.

Phase Three: Advanced DevOps Skills (five months)

Building on the framework, we added additional sophisticated DevOps features to enhance quality and speed delivery even further:

• Microservices Architecture: To enable autonomous deployment and scaling, the monolithic application was broken up into microservices.
• Containerization: Using Kubernetes to organize the migration of apps to containers for better scalability and resource usage
• Using chaos engineering techniques, failure modes were proactively identified and addressed.
• Self-Service Platform: Developed in-house developer platforms that let teams set up environments and launch apps without requiring operations support
• Security Automation: Added compliance checks and security scans to the CI/CD pipeline (DevSecOps)

In order to prevent interfering with continuing progress, this phase required careful preparation and involves a great deal of technical intricacy. Lead Architect David Thompson says, "The microservices transition was particularly challenging." In order to continue delivering new features, we had to manage the complexity of distributed systems and determine the appropriate boundaries for services. It was similar to swapping out the engine while the vehicle was still moving.

Phase 4: Innovation and Continuous Improvement (Ongoing)

After establishing the fundamental DevOps skills, we put in place systems for ongoing innovation and improvement:

• DevOps Center of Excellence: Created a CoE to promote continuous enhancement, exchange best practices, and assess novel instruments and methodologies.
• Inner Source: Inner Source techniques were used to promote teamwork and code reuse.
• Innovation and Hackathons Time: To investigate new technology and methods, frequent hackathons and innovation time were established.
• Automated Governance: To maintain standards without manual checks, automated policy enforcement and compliance checking were put into place.
• Advanced Analytics: Applied analytics to find development process bottlenecks and areas for optimization

Outcomes and Effects

TechInnovate has seen impressive outcomes from the DevOps revolution, which has radically altered its software development and delivery process:

The transition has produced a number of qualitative advantages in addition to these headline metrics:

• Better Time-to-Market: Customers now receive new features in a matter of days or weeks as opposed to months, which allows for a quicker reaction to market opportunities.
• Improved Quality: Defects entering production have been greatly decreased via automated testing and deployment.
• Improved Scalability: The platform can now process five times as many transactions with better efficiency.
• Enhanced Developer Satisfaction: Retention has improved in tandem with a 45% increase in developer satisfaction levels.
• Client Confidence: Increased dependability and quicker feature delivery have improved customer satisfaction and decreased attrition.

"For our company, the DevOps transformation has changed everything. From a business that had trouble releasing software, we are now able to confidently deploy several times a day. Not only has this increased our efficiency, but it has also altered the potential of our product and business. We now have a significant competitive edge since we can react to consumer demands and market opportunities in a matter of days as opposed to months."

— TechInnovate CTO Jason Chen

Lessons Learned

Several important takeaways from the TechInnovate DevOps transition should help other firms starting similar journeys:

• Start with Culture: Although technology and tools are vital, DevOps' organizational and cultural components are frequently more difficult and crucial to its success.
• Assess What Is Important: For the change to be guided and value to be demonstrated, clear measurements that are in line with business outcomes are crucial.
• Equilibrium Speed and Quality: DevOps aims to deliver better software more consistently, not only move more quickly.
• Accept Gradual Change: By dividing the change into smaller, more controllable components, risk is decreased and value is produced more quickly.
• Alignment of Leadership Is Essential: Leadership must consistently support and align, even when the transition encounters obstacles.

Most significantly, the TechInnovate instance shows that DevOps is a fundamental change in software development and delivery that can change a company's competitive position and culture. It is not only a collection of procedures or tools.