Who is the Client

A US-based retailer with more than 700 departmental stores and 150 specialty stores, client is a major player in their industry and one of the oldest shopping destinations for their customers.

The Challenge

The client runs an extensive e-commerce portal that releases new features frequently. The client realized that the existing release process was unable to serve the growing demand for the frequent releases. The unsatisfactory utilization of the IT infrastructure, poor reporting system, and persistent delays were impacting the productivity of the team.

Additionally, the existing DevOps engineers had limited bandwidth to automate or streamline the Release Engineering (RE) operations.

The client was looking for a long-term engagement to optimize their RE operations through a stable sandbox environment for their development and QA teams.

The Solution

GSPANN took complete ownership of delivering an end-to-end automated support for the client’s release operations in a non-production environment. We provided L1/L2/L3 RE support, executed through a scalable service model to remove recurring development and QA defects.

GSPANN started by engaging in an in-depth analysis of the client's existing system and developed a version-control dashboard to quickly check the functional health of all applications running in multiple environments. We defined an escalation matrix and SLA to ensure right level of resolution for the most problematic application/environment, build/deployment failures due to automation, and track used/unused environments.

We defined Atlassian Jira workflow for development and QA teams to troubleshoot their blocking instances. We developed a self-healing mechanism for any post-deployment issue.

GSPANN scripted an automated dashboard with Ruby and Python for proactive monitoring of the RE operations. We developed the application’s frontend in Bootstrap advanced HTML and backend in MySQL. We integrated RESTful APIs with a dashboard to periodically update the health status of all applications and environments. We also automated CyberArk jobs for efficient management of access rights and password storage.

Business Impact

  • Minimized the operational cost for development, QA, release, and performance environments backed by SLA-based deliverables.
  • Enhanced the efficiency and collaboration between globally distributed development and QA teams.
  • Automated BI dashboard with health indicators - increased efficiency of more than 100 environments across 3600+ servers.
  • Developed an interactive UI to simplify the heap memory allocation on virtual machines.

Technologies Used

Atlassian JIRA and Confluence. Platform to manage sprint stories and provide an online team collaboration environment
Docker. A set of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) products that uses OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers
Chef. It streamlines the task of configuring and maintaining a company's servers and can integrate with cloud-based platforms to automatically provision and configure new machines
Zabbix. A mature and effortless enterprise-class open-source monitoring solution for network and application monitoring of millions of metrics
UDeploy and Zeus. Deployment automation tool
Splunk. A horizontal technology used for application management, security, compliance, as well as business and web analytics
Maven and Jenkins. CI/CD build and deployment
Language. Ruby and Python
Database Management System (DMS). Microsoft SQL Server and MongoDB

Related Capabilities

Reduce Downtime by Identifying Improvement Areas with a Proactive Production Support

We have expertise in implementing a preventative approach during production support. Our network operations center (NOC) provides deep application and system monitoring to ensure that you don’t face any surprises. Our production support team can help run your application uninterrupted to keep your customers happy and satisfied.

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