You have probably heard about DevOps (if not, you can check out our previous blog article), what it is, and its benefits.
DevOps combines cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity.
Using DevOps principles, organizations can evolve and improve products faster than organizations that use traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to serve their customers better and compete more effectively.
DevOps has been proven to be a game-changer for companies of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises.
In this article, the second in our DevOps saga, we will show you how DevOps is driving business success to major key business players. You will discover how Google, Walmart, Netflix, and other “giants” are revolutionizing their operations with DevOps and how they achieved significant improvements with those practices.
Amazon
As one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, Amazon has pioneered DevOps implementation.
Amazon realized that delivering features for Amazon.com retail customers, Amazon subsidiaries, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) would require new and innovative software delivery methods.
At the scale of a company like Amazon, thousands of independent software teams must be able to work in parallel to deliver software quickly, securely, reliably, and with zero tolerance for outages.
Thus, they have adopted and implemented Continuous Integration and Deployment, have automated their infrastructure provisioning and configuration using specific tools like AWS CloudFormation to reduce manual errors and inconsistencies, and use a range of monitoring and logging tools like Amazon CloudWatch to ensure that their applications are running smoothly and to identify issues quickly.
By embracing the best practices of automation, collaboration, and experimentation, Amazon has deployed code every 11.7 seconds on average, with over 50 million deployments per year.
According to the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) report, Amazon’s high-performing IT organizations deploy 46 times more frequently, have 440 times faster lead time from commit to deploy, and have 96 times shorter mean time to recover from downtime than their low-performing counterparts.
DevOps is designed to increase deployment frequency, but they know that quality and risk management are as important as speed. Amazon’s implementation of a new load balancer ensured that only one out of every 100,000 deployments resulted in an outage on the Amazon website.
According to John Jenkins, a former lead engineer at Amazon, the transition to agile DevOps is saving millions.
Netflix
Maintaining its place as an industry leader without causing any glitches for its customers requires speed, flexibility, and attention to quality.
The rate at which this entertainment game-changer has adopted new technologies and implemented them into its DevOps approach has set new standards in IT.
Among their best DevOps practices, we can highlight the following:
- Automated Testing: Netflix has automated its testing process to ensure its code changes do not introduce bugs or vulnerabilities.
- Continuous Deployment: A fully automated deployment process was implemented, where code changes are automatically deployed to production after passing through various testing and approval stages.
- Automated monitoring: If the deployment fails, it is rolled back, and traffic is rerouted to the old version.
With over 200 million subscribers globally, Netflix’s DevOps practices have helped them to deliver a seamless and reliable streaming experience to their customers.
Google is known for being at the forefront of technological innovation, and its DevOps practices are no exception.
Google’s DevOps approach is centered around automation and continuous delivery, focusing on building a culture of collaboration and experimentation. They use a tool called Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to maintain the reliability of their services.
Some examples of how Google has implemented DevOps include:
- Infrastructure as code: Google uses Infrastructure as Code (IaaC) tools like Terraform to manage their infrastructure. It allows them to automate the deployment and configuration of their applications and infrastructure, reducing the likelihood of manual errors and improving consistency.
- Continuous delivery: Google strongly focuses on continuous delivery, intending to deliver changes to production as quickly and safely as possible. They use automated testing, canary deployments, and other DevOps practices to enable continuous delivery at scale.
These DevOps practices have helped Google to achieve impressive results; according to a presentation by Google SRE Director of Engineering, Dave Rensin, at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2018, Google deploys code up to 50 times per day with a lead time to deploy under an hour.
By embracing DevOps practices, Google has built and maintained some of the world’s most innovative and reliable services while pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in technology.
Capital One
Capital One, a digital bank with more than 70 million customer accounts and 49,000 employees worldwide, has adopted a DevOps strategy to combat inconsistent releases, multiple handoffs, and manual errors in development that took ages to resolve.
The company has implemented a fully automated CI/CD pipeline, has migrated their monolithic applications to a microservices architecture to improve flexibility and scalability, and moved to the public cloud as they don’t want to spend their technology time managing infrastructure.
By adopting an agile development methodology, which is considered the foundation for DevOps implementation, and the usage of ChatOps, they have improved real-time collaboration and feedback loops between development and operations while streamlining their incident response process.
Above that, the company has a cloud-first policy, and architects deployed the new applications on the cloud, enhancing significantly the DevOps team performance.
“By using AWS, we’ve cut the time needed to build new application infrastructure by more than 99%.”
John Andrukonis, Former Manager VP and Chief Architect, Capital One.
With the help of DevOps, they reduced their time to market by 75% and reduced their lead time to deploy from 6 weeks to 10 minutes. In addition, Capital One has seen a significant increase in its release frequency, with some teams releasing code up to 50 times per day.
“Our DevOps group supports a developer community of close to 7,000 engineers on a platform running more than half a million Jenkins automation pipelines and more than 50,000 build, test, and deploy activities per day. We oversee the entire platform with a small team, which is possible because we’ve adopted DevOps principles, tools, and the flexibility and efficiency those processes give us.”
Chafin Bryant, Senior Software Engineer Manager, Capital One
Walmart
Walmart, one of the world’s largest retailers, has embraced DevOps to improve its e-commerce platform and enhance customer experiences. Walmart has implemented various DevOps practices, including continuous integration and delivery, automated testing, and collaborative workflows.
By using these practices, Walmart has released new features and updates to its e-commerce platform more frequently to deploy code to production multiple times a day.
Walmart has also leveraged machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate parts of its DevOps pipeline, resulting in faster and more accurate testing and deployment.
As a result, Walmart has seen significant improvements in customer satisfaction, with US online sales growing by 70% in the last two years.
Hertz
Hertz is an excellent example of a traditional company that has successfully implemented DevOps to improve their software delivery processes.
In 2016, Hertz partnered with Accenture to implement a DevOps strategy, which included a shift to cloud-based infrastructure and adopting automation tools.
By embracing DevOps practices, Hertz could reduce their deployment time from days to hours and increase deployment frequency to multiple times daily while improving code quality and reducing downtime.
Need Help Implementing DevOps? We’re Here to Help
As you can see, these real-life examples demonstrate how DevOps practices can lead to significant improvements in software development and delivery.
By implementing DevOps, your organization can reduce its time-to-market, improve software quality, and enhance collaboration and efficiency, as those companies did.
If you are looking for a reliable partner to drive your organization through the DevOps journey, look no further than Switch.
With ten years of DevOps experience, we have been providing DevOps services for mid and major corporations. We have helped many organizations, such as Walmart Argentina, Grupo Disco Uruguay, BHC, SBI Insurance and Axletree, successfully implement and optimize their DevOps processes.
However, we know every company is unique and their challenges as well; let’s talk to find out the best solution for your organization to navigate DevOps journey smoothly and drive business.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you achieve your DevOps goals and be your guide on your journey to DevOps excellence.
