Irish State Agency: Accelerating Time-to-Market from Days to Hours with DevOps

After the consolidation of four different companies in one agency, the company inherited a mess of diverse infrastructures, domains, systems, databases, and technologies from four organizations. All this led to an increase in expenses for their maintenance. Since the educational services are widely used across the entire country, it was critical to improve the reliability of all client’s services and decrease the time-to-market.

The Agency addressed Infopulse with a request to support the implementation of their IT strategy, which would help the agency to achieve its strategic business goals. As we expanded the number of services, and shifted to large-scale systems design, a new format of cooperation required a well-thought-out DevOps approach. We needed to reduce the number of technology vendors to one, improve the whole workflow, and cut costs for IT support.

The Infopulse team implemented DevOps practices to accomplish an efficient migration of all systems to one unified technology stack, simplify business processes, and overcome the following challenges:

• The release to production was time-consuming, and in case of large systems could take up to 3 days.
• Deployment as well as testing of the new software version were conducted manually and could take up to a week.
• The whole solution delivery required too much time and required extensive resources.
• We needed to unite customer’s diverse infrastructure, consisting of legacy systems and their numerous dependencies.
• Due to the unorganized tech stack, inherited from the agencies merging, we were lacking insights on how development processes and operations were previously organized.
• Considerable lack of documentation, missing structure procedures, and low performance.

Utilizing the DevOps model, Infopulse team managed to streamline a variety of business processes and demonstrate substantial results:

• 6X faster release-to-production time: The time required to create a new build version decreased from 3 days in all environments to no more than 3-4 hours.
• Automated testing and repeatability of documented processes brought the consistent quality of delivered solutions.
• Automation of previously manual operations and provided transparency of business processes allowed reducing the number of tech support calls, optimizing resources, and cutting operational costs.