Case Study
Upgrading complex legacy infrastructure and accelerating DevOps enablement with automated deployments results in time and cost savings
THE CLIENT
The client is a large, multinational accounting firm with a global professional services network serving 147 countries through a 219,000-member workforce.
CHALLENGE
Code heavy complex system seeks a home in the cloud
The accounting firm’s enterprise management tool, provided as a service to customers, was rooted in a monolithic codebase that consisted of diverse software clusters with many configurable installation patterns. Challenging to deploy due to required custom, manual processes across multiple versions of the platform’s four major components, they had been working on migrating to a hosted solution for quite some time. Seeking a resolution that would ease the setup process and automate updates, they turned to UST for expertise.
TRANSFORMATION
Overcoming intrinsic resistance to automation
Modernization of the tool’s enterprise architecture was a complex challenge. Unlike average pipelines, it was a full-fledged deployment configuration system requiring custom metadata configurations for every customer and associated integrated logic within pipelines, resulting in intrinsic resistance to automation within the system. UST became a strategic development partner for their cloud DevOps team, and a Center of Excellence (COE) team was created to enable DevOps support across the business. Development sprints implemented fully automated continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, upgrading them from legacy architecture and configurations. With expandability as a key objective, standardization and pipeline management software was leveraged to manage processes and automate deployments.
This modernization approach delivered a highly configurable DevOps release pipeline that streamlined tracking of multiple customizations and versions on a per-customer basis. In addition, multiple if-this-than-that scenarios were also applied on a per-customer basis that allowed for customization across all customers’ operations. Examination of branching strategies and commits that supported the core development team with auto builds, avoided hassles of working with demo releases, and a holistic approach to strengthening CI/CD ensured agility with efficiency to best serve the needs of diverse customers.
IMPACT
Hyper-agility delivers significant time savings
Marked and significant time savings in manual deployments that once consumed about 24 hours were reduced to 45 minutes. Automation along CI/CD for hyper-agile development of core components added speed and resilience and resulted in faster deployments with fail-forward abilities to address any problematic releases, combined this provided significant cost savings.
EXPERTISE & RESOURCES
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Digital Transformation Services | Digital Technology Solutions - UST