Client Background
Our client, a telecom company, is a dynamic, world-leading communications and information technology company with $16 billion in annual revenue and 15.2 million customer connections spanning wireless, data, IP, voice, television, entertainment, video, and security, healthcare, and agriculture.
Challenges
The concept of DevOps was already in place with the client as a methodology that was complimentary to the agile processes the Web Development team was already following. However, they are still not getting the far-fetched result, and at large, they are losing productivity, so they wanted to optimize the DevOps journey at the next level with the help of external vendors
Senior managers approved of and supported the methodology as they understood it to be an industry trend and best practice to increase the team’s productivity, optimize the project workflow, develop standardized practices and policies, introduce testing within the pipeline and incorporate time for documentation.
The telecom company’s management team conceptualized DevOps as a set of tools and best practices to progress from start-up mode to a sustainable model with respect to delivering the unit’s web-based products.
Approach
BrickRed started DevOps engagement with a client in 2019. Our approach was to first study the existing DevOps landscape on AWS.
Identified the improvement areas where optimization can be possible and then created a roadmap of deliverables to achieve the same. A dashboard of all the consuming services has been developed so that higher management can review the entire process at a high level.
Initially, the transition to DevOps was not intentional. Since the telecom company, our client was already following the Agile approach for development projects but not efficiently or effectively. Additionally, the department had access to an underutilized AWS account.
The gap analysis, feedback from our leadership team, my own experience, and available resources suggested an opportunity to add automation to our workflow and discover and leverage AWS resources to realize process improvements.
The research for tools that included AWS identified the DevOps methodology as an approach we should look more into. We decided to ‘try it’ because we had the flexibility, and no truly critical systems would break.
How did we get started?
- Identified business problem and existing process
- Evaluated the unit’s development workflow
- Reported on areas that could be improved upon by leveraging this methodology
What steps did you take next?
- Technology research to learn what industry trends were addressing this business problem
- Captured suggestions and recommendations from peers and industry colleagues
- Continued conversation with client’s leadership
- Created DevOps team, which included me as a DevOps Lead and the appropriate staff members to serve as System Admin & Security Manager
- Communicated changes and set expectations with the web dev team to include the PMs, QA & product owner
Lessons Learned
Being a large enterprise, it is always prime to make a more comprehensive inquiry which would have included capturing feedback from other agencies and peers who had implemented or were considering this methodology.
This would have highlighted the many moving pieces that needed to be considered, e.g., stakeholders who would need input into the adoption and acceptance.
This knowledge should also include the extensive research we performed to educate everyone about the concept, process, and policy changes that would impact current workflows and ways of working.
Outcome
- The ability to have an intelligent and coherent conversation with enterprise IT about our unit’s needs and the services required for a smoother transition.
- Many underutilized services were optimized on AWS stack, and hence overall productivity gained
- 99% Uptime:- AWS SLA guarantees an uptime of 99.9%
- more transparent communication process and more frequent check-ins between all stakeholders
