A leading Oil and Gas company recently transformed its IT infrastructure to enhance efficiency and performance through a partnership with RiverSafe.
Faced with challenges stemming from a siloed, on-premise IT model, the organization had struggled to rapidly deliver business-focused development projects, despite adopting a cloud-first approach. Inefficiencies persisted, notably in infrastructure provisioning, which, though improved, remained slow at up to six weeks.
Empowering Business-Focused Development
The head of the trading division's product development teams tasked RiverSafe with developing
The head of the trading division's product development teams tasked RiverSafe with developing a robust, scalable solution that would enable efficient, secure, and rapid development.
The aim was to allow the team to self-provision infrastructure swiftly, minimizing delays and enhancing time-to-market while embedding strong security and high resilience.
The Customer's Needs
The client's core requirements were straightforward: provisioning infrastructure without dependence on multiple handoffs, rapid deployment of services, improved product time-to-market, minimized downtime, and enhanced security and quality.
RiverSafe stepped in to address these stipulations by implementing a comprehensive DevOps strategy.
Implementation of the DevOps Solution
RiverSafe initiated by value-stream mapping existing processes and introduced automation
RiverSafe initiated by value-stream mapping existing processes and introduced automation to replace manual tasks.
They evaluated the application estate to tailor their DevOps application needs, selecting a Kubernetes cluster with an OpenShift platform due to its compatibility with RedHat products already in use.
Development Teams and Infrastructure Overhaul
A two-pronged team approach was utilized; one team developed the high-availability platform supporting auto-scaling by Kubernetes and Terraform modules, optimized through chaos testing to ensure resilience.
The second team created a pipeline facilitating a secure, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CICD) system. This pipeline allowed developers to deploy applications with rigorous security assessments and testing protocols efficiently.
Streamlining Developer Onboarding
One significant improvement was the automation of the pipeline and onboarding process
One significant improvement was the automation of the pipeline and onboarding process.
Previously taking four weeks, now new developers could be fully operational in under 30 minutes, thanks to automated onboarding processes and self-service tools provisioned directly from the secrets vault.
Proof of Concept and Progressive Implementation
Starting with a proof of concept, these innovations were gradually refined and rolled out organization-wide, consistently iterating for improvements.
This strategic phased implementation ensured reduced disruption and allowed RiverSafe to fine-tune the system according to business needs.
Substantial Business Impact
The transition delivered significant business benefits, notably saving over 25,000 engineering days
The transition delivered significant business benefits, notably saving over 25,000 engineering days and substantially reducing the time for developers to access required tools.
The implementation has meant easier management of the software delivery process, curtailing previous support requests related to software builds.
Financial and Operational Gains
The introduced system saw 735 services onboarded across 56 projects, applying to 1608 pipelines executed over 235,000 times.
These improvements contributed to savings exceeding £17 million over three years, with a continual impact as more of the business adopts these enhanced processes.
The client, a pioneering Oil and Gas company, had formed a large central IT capability after many years of mergers and acquisitions. The team had an established on-premise capability, but it was made up of multiple siloed teams and disjointed processes.
The company had been progressing a modernising cloud-first approach but had duplicated the organizational and process-based model they had on-premise during the process.
Business-focused development teams
The resulting cloud offering improved provision times from 4-6 months to 4-6 weeks but there were still huge inefficiencies that were limiting the ability of business-focused development teams to deliver value quickly.
The head of the trading division product development teams asked RiverSafe to provide a secure, resilient, consistent and scalable solution that would empower developers in their business segment.
Customer requirements
The customer requirements were:
- To be able to provision our own ‘infrastructure’ without relying on handoffs to multiple teams.
- To accelerate the infrastructure process. “We want hosting of services in minutes not weeks.”
- To improve our time to market for our products.
- To minimize downtime.
- To be able to experiment.
- All of this with higher levels of embedded security, higher quality and higher resilience.
The solution
RiverSafe was engaged to help resolve these frustrations and pain points through the implementation of a DevOps approach. They started by value-streaming the existing process, creating automation to replace manual processes, and sizing the application estate to determine what their application needs were.
They chose a kubernetes cluster as our target architecture. In this instance, Openshift was the best fit for their needs as most of the existing application estate uses RedHat products. They worked in two teams – one building the ‘platform’, one building a pipeline that could deploy assets into the platform in a secure manner.
The platform team
The container platform team delivered a platform that had high availability embedded. This provided the capability to significantly reduce downtime by allowing Kubernetes and the terraform modules to scale up and down nodes, pods, and routes automatically based on events occurring within and outside the cluster.
Chaos testing was embedded to ensure that previously catastrophic events could be created to ensure service architecture could accommodate these failures within the stated non-functional requirements.
The pipeline team
In the previous working model, developers were using various tools, leading to a lack of control, and making the overall management of the process very difficult.
To resolve these issues, the pipeline team delivered a reference Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CICD) pipeline. This included all the DevOps best practices and ensured fully automated build and deployment flow through environments to production, including security scans, testing and automated change processes.
New users with a new pipeline
With this pipeline, developers can quickly and easily provision services and components for their applications in just seconds (rather than weeks). Developers have the assurance that they are consistently delivering compliant and tested code which has undergone stringent security scanning at each stage of the process.
The team also worked to automate the automation. They built a self-service process to allow new users with a new pipeline along with automatic onboarding to all of the DevOps tool chain. This includes accounts and permissions allocated within the container cluster stored in a secrets vault. Where this process for onboarding new teams and users used to take four weeks it now took 30 minutes.
Initial proof of concept and implemented changes
This new approach is repeatable and consistent and ensures that new team members and projects have the tools they need right from the start, without unnecessary delays or wait times. It also means that if changes to a particular tool are needed, these can be rolled out to all existing teams with minimal impact on project timelines.
With each of these solutions, we started with an initial proof of concept and implemented changes in a small area, iterated to make sure we improved, and then rolled out to the wider business, improving all the time.
The outcome
The impact on the business of these changes has already been huge. The previous time wasted for developers to get the tools and provisions they needed has been eliminated with infrastructure able to be spun up in seconds and new developers able to start building code in under 30 minutes (as opposed to several weeks). Over the course of the project, this has meant a saving of more than 25,000 engineering days to date.
The standardization has meant that managing the software delivery process has become much easier. Prior to the introduction there were numerous support requests to the tools and platform teams due to software build issues. We provide well-documented standards and, as everyone was working on the same pattern, the technology transfer across the organization was vastly improved.
Impacting container platforms and tooling
As a result, all of these support requests stopped and the teams could focus on the operational incidents impacting container platforms and tooling.
Currently, 735 services have been onboarded, which spanned 56 projects and 1074 repos. The pattern was applied to 1608 pipelines and those pipelines were run 235,000 times. But key for the business has been the cost savings, which so far have amounted to over £17m over a three-year period. And are still increasing as this is rolled out further within the business.
