Do you know most companies adopt hashtag#DevOps in an ad-hoc fashion, without a clear roadmap or strategic plan?
We recently came across a digital marketing platform company, Punchh, which was struggling because of this.

In the words of Punchh CTO Aditya Sanghi: “We lacked a clear CI/CD strategy and our automation was too people-dependent and custom. As a result, onboarding new customers or making changes to existing services required a lot of custom work and our environments and configs were prone to drifts. We needed a way to keep up with a rapidly growing customer base without burning out the team.”

Aditya started looking for a CI/CD platform that would provide them with zero-touch automation and economies of scale as they accelerated their growth.

With Shippable, he found a team that took the approach of “solving the problem together” as opposed to just “selling a platform.” The result? Zero-touch automation across all services and customer deployments in less than one month, while shrinking automation codebase by 80% and increasing deployment speed by 5x.

Results

With Shippable, the Punchh team achieved zero-touch automation with a streamlined toolchain in less than 1 month. Some highlights of the new CI/CD automation workflows are:

1. Customer on-boarding takes less than one day, during which the Punchh team team can bring up a brand new instance of their service. This was reduced from 2-3 weeks of effort.
2. Deployment reliability has gone up 80 %, and time spent in debugging release issues has reduced by 4x.
3. Automation code reuse has gone from ~10% to 95%.
4. Adding new workflows or changing existing ones takes less than half a day, down from 2-3 weeks.
5. Ramp up time for new developers has gone from months to less than 1 week.
6. Docker build performance has improved 400%, from 120 mins/day to 30 mins/day.

The complete case study is here

How are you doing DevOps at your organization?
Do you have a systematic road-map and a startegic plan?