Case Study
How a U.K. retailer automated DevOps microservices and practices to accelerate continuous delivery
OUR CLIENT
This U.K.-based retailer has supported the wellbeing of communities all over Europe and Asia for almost 200 years. This private company employs more than 50,000 people and operates approximately 2,000 pharmacy locations.
THE 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 the company’s ecommerce marketplace made it challenging to accelerate rapid releases. High infrastructure costs and siloed system services consumed resources and duplicated efforts because they weren’t designed to be shared across the enterprise. The client needed to modernize old monolithic applications and adopt a microservices architecture to automate and orchestrate the rapid deployment of new features and products in the cloud. The company needed to accelerate its release cycle time and curb maintenance and data center costs.
THE 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 its speed to market through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) 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 its back-end digital operations and customer-facing applications. By establishing standardized DevOps practices across distributed teams and modern automation and orchestration capabilities, the client improved the quality and speed of delivery while reducing overall infrastructure costs by 25%.
THE 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 times 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 than the previous system's time, effort, and cost. Significant improvements included:
- 80% faster deployments through CI/CD pipeline implementation
- Release frequency increased by 4X
- New Azure cloud provides robust framework for security and data protection
Learn more about the expertise and resources that helped us achieve success on this project.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/what-we-do/digital-transformation
https://www.ust.com/en/insights/what-is-devops-and-where-are-all-the-ops-going