The Introduction:

Client is a leading Shipping and Logistics company in the Western Europe and has been dealing with major port authorities globally along with their global customer base. They have surface and sea freight services as their core and also manage their own fleet for various ground services. They have mature IT setup and technology tools employed to keep their day to day operations up to the mark through cutting edge technologies. With the aging of a traditional form of development practices, the Client was inquisitive about revamping the same and further optimize the development process.

Key Stats

With digitization rising at an incredible speed, it becomes important for the company IT leaders embed features that map the needed demands. Where the conventional IT infrastructure undertakes two to three days to even trace a big, the modern era of DevOps has the ability to build and launch a new product within a day. No wonder, why IT companies are mitigating towards the integration of DevOps rapidly. Supporting the above, few facts include:

• The global market size of automation in the manufacturing industry has increased to $ 156.2 billion.
• The capacity of creation leveraged by 25-30%.
• Reduction in flight time to market by 75%.
• Time consumed during regression testing reduced by 30%.

The Problem Statement

No doubt, IT is one such industry that changes and constantly. Technology is improving each passing and with it, the needs and wants of business organizations drift dramatically. It becomes imperative for the IT leaders to stay abreast with the ongoing technological modifications and likewise update the same.

Their business had outgrown technology and it seemed the throughput was comparatively low. Though the existing software mirrors development, yet it was ineffective in automating updates, software releases or bug fixes. Even in the fact of constant innovation, all of the above required manual support. This in a way led to greater time of development and thereby reduced the overall productivity.

In addition to the above, the current infrastructure mandated different tools and teams for different processes. For instance, if Client has to develop a project, it would require a development team along with its separate and latest technology set that they can sustain with in another 5 to 7 years minimum, an operation and management team and even a testing team to verify the final product developed. All of this added to the cost of development, maintenance and the time taken to deliver a single project making the entire process cumbersome. Further, different teams suggested different work processes which might further delay the delivery.

Our Solution

Considering that the development team and operation management team worked in isolation which increased the development time, we proposed them with the idea of shifting to DevOps using Microsoft .Net framework. The fact that DevOps integrates all the team under a single roof and automates the majority of the tasks, the IT infrastructure of the company could easily optimize the software development process. Adopting the agile methodology promotes quick turn around on pieces of requirments, quick visibility on desired outcome, faster development, increasing the throughput of the organization and instilling customer trust. This proved to be a huge success for the company.

“I’d define Stridely’s services, as ‘Captivating’, they have streamlined their workforce and were very clear on the project scope. Though our work integration has ended, every time when I need to update this solution, they are the only choice I would look forward to.”

The Results

Given that DevOps aids automation at large, the integration of the same led to

• 95% automation in development
• One day deployment
• Changes in live environment for smaller modules
• Reduce regression time by 30%
• Integrate 25% more features

Detailed Evaluation

In order to scale up the IT operations, one of the best strategies was adopting DevOps. It has the ability to keep track of technological advancement and likewise modify business strategies. The first benefit of integrating DevOps is its ability to keep all under the same table. DevOps integrated the Development team and the Operation Management team. This is way shifts the modular approach to a more unified and strategic approach. Since all work in a single team, they could use their skills to quicken the development process and enhance the same.

Also, DevOps automated entire development process. Using Scrum Agile execution methodology, the DevOps ensured following an iterative process with a backlog plan already in hand to counter the turnaround time. The continuous delivery (CD) affirmed that the entire system had been rationalized to integrate CI-CD process paving way for maximum automation. Further, the fact that most of the tasks were then automated , it reduced the possibility of human error. CD ensured automating a processes that loop towards development. Using cloud technologies, tasks such as quality testing and monitoring were automated, leading to the development of efficient software.

CI or continuous integration helpd in identifying errors easily by integrating errors. Since the changes made aren’t big, locating and fixing them is never an issue. This in a way accounts for automating the process of build and test which then reduced the cost incurred in testing and fixing the error. Such an infrastructure ensured that the operation never hauls and enables developers to test the software under extreme conditions.

With computerized testing, developers could then save considerable time which could be used for development and management operation. Regression testing was improved with a 30% cut-off in total time. Additionally, the DevOps infrastructure aided better management of tasks and backlog, leading to efficient monitoring of the development phase and hence, optimizing it on a whole.

Future Prospects

Till date, we have seen DevOps do all good. Automate task, optimize the development process and enhance the overall productivity. But then, the company sees issues related to security and privacy. And so in near future, it would be necessary for the company to integrate with cloud services and additional features to add a layer of security. There could be a possibility of ML integration with DevOps to identify risk, and performance issues so that they can be smartly handled. It would then lead to better detection of errors and solve them long before they go live in a way narrowing down the phase of development.