Our client develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware and other products related to the communication and information technology industry worldwide. Additionally, the company offers security products including cloud, email, endpoint, web, and network security; advanced malware protection; and next generation intrusion prevention systems.
Business Challenge
Our client wanted to improve collaboration and productivity with regards to:
- Continuous development
- Continuous integration
- Continuous testing
- Continuous monitoring
- Virtualization and containerization
Project Description
The client, in search of a responsible partner, decided to collaborate with SoftServe. The main service—release engineering—provided by SoftServe’s DevOps team supported the building environment for two Scrum development teams. Also, it included:
- New feature introduction
- Package buildings for developers
- Product packages support
- Full continuous integration and continuous deployment support within the client’s threat intelligence source control
- Third party apps support—check for vulnerabilities, support and monitor the internal environment
The team’s efforts concentrated on the new environment introduction based on simple technologies, such as Jenkins for continuous integration, GitLab for source control—migration from Perforce, Ansible Tower for continuous deployment.
The SoftServe DevOps team followed the Scrumban, a hybrid of Scrum and Kanban, methodology. The team consisted of three professionals that worked closely with two development Scrum teams—one SoftServe team and one from the client's side.
There were three sources for gathering requirements—weekly meeting with the client’s architect, Jira tasks formed by the teams, and the DevOps team's improvement initiatives. Additionally, SoftServe made two onsite visits that helped the team align with the client's Scrum and DevOps teams.
The main challenge of the project was changing the workflow as a result of the migration to the new environment (Jenkins, GitLab, Ansible). Each week started with requirements discussions and suggestions for additional activities. At the end of the week, the team discussed the work completed and any potential roadblocks.
The SoftServe team offered an “on-call” service 24/7. If the client urgently needed assistance, primary and secondary contacts were available around the clock, and they could be contacted via mobile phone when needed during any period—day or night.
Value Delivered
The SoftServe team helped the client to significantly increase productivity and optimize work in the environments. The client also saved on costs. Finally, the 24/7 support was the perfect solution for emergency issues that helped the client ensure everything was always under control.