DevOps Use Cases

To gather insights on the state of DevOps, we spoke with 22 executives at 19 companies implementing DevOps for themselves and helping clients to implement a DevOps methodology. We asked, "What are a couple of real-world problems being solved with DevOps by your company or clients?" Here's what they told us:

Industry Examples

• 1) An online financial trading company used to be able to deploy only after trading hours which meant long nights or weekends for employees. We enabled them to deploy in 45 seconds. 2) A large telecom in China needed to reduce cycle times for development, building, and testing. We created a backbone of automation to get internal customers on board and once they saw the reduction in time required to build, test, and deploy all the other teams were anxious to deploy the automated methodology.
• Telco service provider was rolling out new versions of network cycling through design and deployment. We implemented rapid design, test, and deploy 10X faster. Today you add security patches daily rather than every three months. 
• 1) Car manufacturer doing load testing during launch was not able to scale and catch the error in production. They came to us and we solved the problem. 2) United Airlines changed their continuous testing paradigm within the company saving $500,000 while increasing code coverage 85%. 3) GM Financial was able to reduce loan funding time by 5X while reducing regression testing 93%. 4) Reduced bugs by 35%. Used to find 40% in pre-production – now 0%. 5) After a comprehensive evaluation of the tools available on the market, Rabobank conducted a proof of concept exercise with our product. The solution massively reduces regression testing timelines following changes to requirements. By increasing the efficiency and accuracy of its testing processes, Rabobank will be able to produce higher quality apps in a shorter timeframe for its customers. 
• Key Bank had an existing legacy app that stood the test of time but could not move to mobile. They did a “lift and shift” to our platform exposing what they needed to as Rest services and built the UI on top. They actually deployed on TomKat. People make pragmatic engineering decisions and recognize tremendous benefits. Key Bank reduced its delivery cadence from three months to one-week integrating compliance and security into the process. 
• We have a financial services client with multiple terabytes of market data, from the 1970’s, in cold storage. Their data is growing exponentially at one TB per month. They cannot store all of that data in their primary location. They used a script and our technology to identify data and bring to a near-term platform for modeling. Other clients have traditional infrastructure-level platforms to manage and continuously refresh a self-service portal for the end users. They use APIs under the covers to manage and move data. 
• 1) In e-retail and web content we’re able to apply across the entire base even though the company may not have the skillset. Taking prepackaged services into existing clients to provide a best practice framework to simplify so it can be adopted by the existing employees and organization. 
• 1) Online retail dynamic content constant changes do not affect the vitality of the online process where visual monitoring is crucial. 2) In pharma and financial services constant changes and updates for regulatory compliance. Warnings, regulations and the fine print is consistently presented.

Application Examples

• Four major use cases: 1) Operation and cost focus – reduced compute and memory with containerization and resulting in a 40 to 60% reduction in compute and memory. 2) Rolling releases methodology via containers, CI/CD failovers, faster releases, faster responses to customers, better team morale. 3) True hybrid cloud – and public. Enables the customer to burst into the cloud and change data centers as needed. 4) Security pushes faster with CVE scanning and static code analysis before production. 
• Speed and efficiency of getting changes into customers hands and providing a great CX.
• 1) Insert threat detection in CI/CD. 2) Protect against OWASP risks. 3) Prevent data leaks. 4) Use OSS safely. 5) Reduce mean time to recovery.
• Higher quality code and apps delivered to the customer more quickly.
• Able to identify issues, fix, and deploy quickly.
• Any software project is able to use the tools we are offering – even legacy apps just need to add a single file for CI. Enable a CI pipeline, review, auto deploy to staging or a production environment. Because of our permission scheme, you can push projects from template CI/CD defaults that can be deployed to staging or production. Support for frameworks and languages is expanding. 
• For us, a big driver in moving to continuous delivery was minimizing downtime – it is much easier to plan the deployment of small, incremental changes with zero downtime than a range of changes all bundled up into a big release.
• We had a customer create an integrated test environment with a copy of production data and ephemeral staging environments. Reduced issues in production to zero. Went from five-week to two-week sprint cycles, tightened their development cycle and provided value to the customer quicker.
• We make it easier for developers via our toolkit, a DevOps API management platform.
• One major real world problem solved by DevOps was our Disaster Recovery process. We went from a long manual process to an automated and quick solution. Secondly, we have centralized the logging and monitoring of our platform. This improves our overall operational efficiencies and ensures our clients are up and running the way they expect to be.
• Tools work together with a more seamless transition. This leads to the agile rollout of code with an audit trail, fewer manual steps, closer tie between operations and engineering.
• Provide visibility into and measurement of the process. Need to be able to see the process and have visibility into every sub-process in the development environment. The workflow engine tracks and traces where problems are and auto-corrects them providing a cleaner build before production. Measure performance against a predefined plan. This enables you to take corrective action if necessary. Visibility, measurement, and improvement are keys to a successful DevOps implementation. See what’s in the pipeline, when it needs to change, and be able to make the change in the pipeline.

Here’s who we talked to:

• Gil Sever, CEO, Applitools
• Mike Tria, Head of Infrastructure, Atlassian
• John Trembley, CMO and Scott Harvey, V.P. Engineering, Atmosera
• Aruna Ravichandran, VP DevOps Products and Solutions Marketing, CA Technologies
• Flint Brenton, CEO, Collabnet
• Tom Hearn, Data Center Architect, Datalink
• Shehan Akmeemana, CTO, Data Dynamics
• Robert Reeves, Co-founder and CTO, Datical
• Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud
• Job van der Voort, Vice President of Product, GitLab
• Ben Slater, Chief Product Officer,
• Ilya Pupko, Chief Architect, Jitterbit
• Tom Joyce, CEO, Pensa
• Stephanos Bacon, Chief of Product, Portfolio Strategy for Application Platforms, Red Hat
• Michael Mazyar, CTO, Samanage
• Eric Wahl, IT Director and John Joseph, Vice President of Marketing, Scribe Software
• Manish Gupta, CEO and Founder, ShiftLeft
• Martin Loewinger, Director of SaaS Operations and Jonathan Parrilla, DevOps Engineer, SmartBear
• Chris McFadden, V.P. Engineering and Operations, SparkPost