GROUPE ADEO, headquartered in France, is the fourth largest Do-It-Yourself (DIY) retailer in the world. With annual turnover of €12.8 billion, its 62,400 employees work within 24 companies operating in 11 countries. All GROUPE ADEO companies share a common goal: "To help each homeowner envision his or her ideal home and make it a reality." To that end, stores offer an array of products--about 60,000 per store, on average--as well as workshops and expert advice to help guide the homeowner in their DIY project.

"Ongoing customer satisfaction is our most important goal. That means considering the entire customer experience--whether in-store or online," says Cyril Lakech, development team member, Adeo Services.

Challenge

GROUPE ADEO faced several challenges in their online e-commerce business. Between the various companies, there were 30 websites and several different e-commerce applications in use. Additionally, business requirements were mandating system enhancements, particularly to support marketing and social media needs. Finally, seasonal spikes in volume could sometimes cause less than optimal system performance for GROUPE ADEO customers. For all these reasons, GROUPE ADEO wanted to develop a new e-commerce platform to support their business units, worldwide.

"Development of a new e-commerce application will enable us to provide a level of standardization globally, as well as flexibility for GROUPE ADEO entities to extend the application with new concepts and features," says Lakech.

GROUPE ADEO saw the cloud as an accelerator to the development effort. "A Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution would not require time and effort on our part to maintain, and would be accessible by team members in different geographical locations," says Lakech. "We realized a PaaS could get us where we wanted to be today--on the timeline we needed."

Finally, GROUPE ADEO was committed to its existing Jenkins CI development platform. Jenkins CI supports GROUPE ADEO's commitment to agile development via continuous integration (CI).

Solution

With assistance from Groupe Sfeir, a systems integrator, the team selected CloudBees' DEV@cloud solution. During the decision process, Sfeir consultants used DEV@cloud and RUN@cloud to prototype a lightweight version of the application. When the Sfeir team was able to instantly set up a Jenkins-based environment and create a simple prototype in five days, GROUPE ADEO saw the advantages of developing on the CloudBees' PaaS.

"Adeo needed to combine continuous integration for agile development with the simplicity and elasticity of the cloud," says Didier Girard, CTO, Groupe Sfeir. "When we researched available options, there was really only one--CloudBees DEV@cloud. We didn't find any other production-ready PaaS solutions that could provide the same functionality provided within DEV@cloud."

"With PaaS development, our team doesn't have to deal with infrastructure issues at all. As a result, we have been much more efficient in setting up our build and run platform for this project than we have been on past projects," says Lakech. "Further, with our team split between sites in France, India and Belgium, developing in the cloud enables us to easily collaborate."

CloudBees' RUN@cloud is also in use for software testing and deployment. "We perform continuous deployment from development to production in several ways," explains Lakech. "First, we can use the CloudBees SDK to push the application out, manually, to RUN@cloud. A second way we deploy is to use the Jenkins build application and then deploy to RUN@cloud via that process; if the build runs successfully, the application automatically deploys. Finally, a third way is to use Maven. We deploy with Maven when we want to demonstrate application functionality to GROUPE ADEO stakeholders."

Besides the productivity advantages cloud development provides, there are very real financial advantages to cloud deployment. As with most retailers, GROUPE ADEO experiences periods of high demand, when system load increases dramatically. "By eventually deploying the e-commerce application to the cloud, GROUPE ADEO won't have to invest in a huge supporting infrastructure for the limited times during the year when demand spikes up," explains Lakech. "When we need more system resources we can instantly get them. Meanwhile, the higher resource level isn't our steady state for the rest of the year. We only pay for what we need." The first pilot of the application will occur in late 2011.

Results

• Speed-up by more than a factor of five, in setting up project infrastructure. "We were able to start our project more than five times faster than if we had gone the traditional route of having to initialize the development environment," says Lakech. "We did not have to spend hours or days on installation. I just clicked on the CloudBees website to subscribe to the platform."

• One week of development productivity gained, each month. "In the cloud, there is virtually no downtime, the infrastructure is always available. Our average uptime is much higher than if we hosted and maintained the infrastructure ourselves," says Lakech. "We have eliminated about two days per month of system downtime. Additionally, I have gained back about three days per month that I used to spend installing various software and performing other upgrades and system maintenance. Now I focus 100% of my time on application development."

• Ability to instantly secure additional resources, via cloud elasticity. The elasticity provided by the cloud has improved productivity. "Across GROUPE ADEO, we have hundreds of people in development. When one team is running a big build, it can consume a significant amount of resources. During those times, even a small build initiated by another team can't run. The e-commerce project team, along with other teams, used to spend time waiting to get access to computing resources," explains Lakech. "Now, with DEV@cloud, we have zero bottlenecks. If we have a big build, we can instantly expand our cloud resources to run it. Once the build runs, we are back to our baseline resource utilization. It is so much more efficient."

• Easy extensibility of platform functionality. "The open API CloudBees provides allows other software providers to integrate with the platform. This allows us to easily extend platform functionality to fit our specific needs. One example of this is our experience with Sonar. We used to have to maintain our Sonar server. Now, with one click, we have Sonar integrated into the CloudBees platform and we are able to run Sonar analysis very quickly. Instead of worrying about integration with other vendor applications--and maintaining them--it's one click and one platform for us to deal with."