Customer story presented at Lunch and Learn, hosted by CloudBees

Last Friday, CloudBees hosted a very successful open Lunch and Learn event at Morton’s Steakhouse in downtown San Jose, CA.
We had the pleasure to have one of our valued and quite recent new customers come present the story of their progress towards revolutionizing the overall software development process by the enablement of a Development Cloud , powered by ElectricCommander . This customer, one of the largest leading global data center providers, has defined quite an aggressive, comprehensive and interesting set of 2011 goals and KPI’s within their R&D organization, very much focusing on automation, optimization and monitoring of their Build-Test-Deploy process. Here are some of these goals:
• Wherever possible, all steps in the development process must be automated and fully repeatable, across all Environments
• Build, Test, Deployment and Release to any Environment must be finished within minutes. All lead-times must be predictable and measureable in detail.
• Virtual environments must be provisioned and configured on demand, with speed and reliability. There can be no virtual machine sprawl.
• Fully automated monitoring of Environments for health, while automatically keeping track of what artifacts has been deployed where and when.
Prior to using ElectricCommander, some of the pain points that this particular customer were facing on a day-to-day basis included:
• Highly manual process making the overall Build-Test-Deploy workflow very slow, brittle and error-prone
• No control of artifacts or monitoring across Environments, making deployment rollback extremely difficult
• Huge lead-times for manually build-up and proper configuration of VM’s
So where are this customer now on accomplishing these goals and eliminating the problems above? After just a few months of ElectricCommander deployment, here are some of the immediate returns and benefits that were presented to all of us last week:
• Speed: Overall automation and parallelization is providing tremendous agility and elimination of lead-times, across the full development cycle and all Environments. VM’s are now built-up and configured on-the-fly and on-demand.
• Trust: Measurable and monitored builds, tests and deployments enables reliability, repeatability and predictability
• Artifact Management: Automated rollbacks of Environments to any previously deployed artifact are now easily performed
• Reduced TCO: A smaller DevOps team are now able to support many more projects and development initiatives in parallel. Dependencies have now migrated away from people to the (automated) streamlined process.
Pretty cool stuff. It was a great event - I get pumped by all of these stories of how we are able to help our customers revolutionize their software development lifecycle!