Case Study

Automating DevOps microservices and practices to accelerate continuous delivery

Adopting a cloud-based containerization platform powered by Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), the client could automate and deploy more releases faster than ever before.
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THE CLIENT

One of the largest companies operating in the retail and wholesale pharmacy sector serving the United Kingdom.

CHALLENGE

Unable to deploy software releases fast enough to keep up with digital pharmacy customer demands

Consumer demands for convenient online pharmacy services put pressure on the client to deliver a better customer experience. But the legacy eCommerce architecture that powered their eCommerce marketplace made it challenging to accelerate rapid releases. High infrastructure costs and siloed systems services consumed resources and duplicated efforts because they weren’t designed to be shared across the enterprise. The client needed to modernize old monolithic architectures and adopt microservices to automate and orchestrate the rapid deployment of new features and products in the cloud. They needed to accelerate their release cycle time and curb maintenance cost and data center costs.

TRANSFORMATION

Adopting cloud-based microservices to power digital agility

Adopting a cloud-based containerization platform powered by Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), the client could automate and deploy more releases faster than ever before. Sharing components and resources across the enterprise optimized greater operational efficiencies, enforced tighter security, and reduced cloud hosting and data storage costs.

By migrating the pharmacy chain’s systems to a more scalable and reusable architecture, the client accelerated their speed to market through continuous integration and delivery throughout the software delivery life cycle. Besides modernizing the client’s retail backbone, UST worked alongside the client’s Center of Excellence and enablement teams to speed the adoption of best in cloud engineering and automated testing practices. Within six months, the client had established a sustainable framework to accelerate digital agility with modern, scalable microservices, reusable CI/CD templates, and more efficient delivery practices to automate faster updates to their back-end digital operations and customer-facing applications. By establishing standardized DevOps practices across distributed teams and modern automation and orchestration capabilities, the client was able to improve the quality and speed of delivery while reducing overall infrastructure costs by 25%.

IMPACT

Accelerating faster time-to-market and achieving manageable costs

After modernizing the client’s DevOps framework, automated deployments now range between 15 - 45 minutes. Production release cycle time went from every three weeks to every three days. Creating six different environments for enterprise delivery, the client now runs nearly 20 application services at 25% less the previous system's time, effort, and cost.

Significant improvements included:

EXPERTISE & RESOURCES

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Learn more about the expertise and resources that helped us achieve success on this project.

Digital Transformation Services | Digital Technology Solutions - UST

Cloud Services & Solutions | Cloud Transformation - UST

Retail Transformation Services and Technology Solutions | UST