The Shining Stars of DevOps: Our 2018 Customer Innovation Award Winners

Not too long ago, DevOps was the new buzzword. Thankfully, the shiny new toy of DevOps has passed the hype phase, and it’s moved into the mainstream. In fact, Forrester predicted that 2018 would be the year of enterprise DevOps, citing “data confirming that 50% of organizations are implementing DevOps [and] DevOps has reached “Escape Velocity” (2018: The Year of Enterprise DevOps ).

We wholeheartedly agree that DevOps and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are here to stay. In fact, the early-adopters, like our two CloudBees Innovation Award winners, are pushing the envelope, helping to drive adoption and show what’s possible with DevOps. We’re thrilled to celebrate the 2nd annual CloudBees Innovation Award Winners — Autodesk and ABN AMRO .

Our winners were chosen by industry leaders in their own right: Chris Condo, senior analyst of Forrester, Alan Shimel, editor in chief of DevOps.com and Sacha Labourey, CEO of CloudBees.

Autodesk—DevOps Automation Excellence Award

Recognized for automation excellence, Autodesk went beyond the typical scope of CI to create a Jenkins-based CI/CD solution for the whole product. The CI pipeline continuously integrated source code and product documentation, then continuously localizing this content to multiple languages.

In addition to having a fully automated CD pipeline that published documentation to their company portal, Autodesk went on to create a fully automated, SOC 2 compliant, CD pipeline that deploys containerized services and apps out to Amazon’s AWS. It required significant teamwork across three organizations to pull this off. Engineering developed the container deployment infrastructure on top of ECS. The cloud infrastructure team managed networking, VPC and core tools; and the engineering solutions team created the CD workflow that linked the complex set of tools together into a highly automated solution.

According to George Swan, Autodesk’s director of engineering solutions, “Our CI/CD solution gives teams the ability to automatically deploy localized source and documentation content into production multiple times a day with lead times measured within one to four hours.”

ABN AMRO—DevOps Scalability Achievement Award

With the most outstanding highly-scaled CD and DevOps implementation, ABN AMRO shifted its development organization from waterfall to agile and CI/CD. The company wanted to speed software delivery, decrease code issues, eliminate manual processes and approvals and also streamline collaboration between development and operations.

Stefan Simenon, Head of COE Software Development and Tooling, said, “As an organization, we needed to step-up our game to stay ahead of our competition. Big releases with long lead-times weren’t cutting it anymore. We created a Jenkins pipeline proof-of-concept project, and with the success of the initial project, we convinced management to roll out CI/CD across the organization. The results have been stellar—release frequency up 600%, reduced build times by 70%, testing time reduced by 75%. The private banking team reduced its build-time from five hours to five minutes, and the mobile and internet banking team can deliver a release every two weeks instead of every quarter. Soon, they will move to every two days.”

Both of these companies exemplify innovation and leadership in DevOps and CI/CD. Congratulations to Autodesk and ABN AMRO!