With a mission to enable organizations to transform with technology in a digital, mobile-first, data-driven world, Embee has become a preferred technology partner for enterprises across various industries. What has been most heartening in this journey over the last few years has been Embee’s transformation from a primarily licensing oriented reseller to a solution and services-oriented partner.
With a focus on digital transformation, Embee enables its customers to drive systematic business changes with the latest technologies and be ahead of the curve. In particular, our journey with App Modernization, utilizing the latest technologies on Azure, has enabled transformations for several customers.
One recent engagement that stands out was with a renowned next-gen technology services provider. It supports enterprises globally to transform their businesses along with application development and outsourcing services.
With more than 28 years of presence in the industry, they are also into the business of offering architecture consulting, application management, and integration services.
Challenge: Finding the speed to innovate
How to profitably deliver technology services to customers had become a critical challenge for the business. Aside from the cost, there were a host of reasons driving them to seek remedies for the technology delivery model. Antiquated technologies, complex systems, and processes, and uncoordinated actions by disconnected teams were the hindrances that were stopping their tech teams to innovate faster.
Here’s what the process looked like:
- Software development and rollout involved a period of iterations, during which all changes were “frozen”.
- The software changes across the organization were integrated into one package and reviewed for weeks by a large team of testers.
- In parallel, a separate team used to set up the supporting technology infrastructure. The process took a few weeks.
- The release was deployed only after all these steps were completed. Even with this lengthy process, it often resulted in buggy software.
To sum it up, before developing the DevOps solution, the development teams worked in siloes – manually merging and publishing the entire source code and sending them to an operations team, who in turn used to deploy the software into production.
Hence, the process was prone to errors, time-consuming, and required extended time-to-market. Besides, the segregation through development, testing, and production had no single accountability.
Moreover, all the applications used by the company were on-premise. This made it difficult to scale them up. Also, the release cycle of the applications was a lengthy process and took a longer time to implement. Further, in case of bugs and errors, the application required to be commenced all over again with the code.
With all these challenges, the technology solutions provider was looking at building an automatic platform as a solution. Thus, they partnered with Embee to implement Azure DevOps.
Modernizing Development with DevOps – Solution details and benefits
They wanted to overcome the challenges faced due to the use of manual tools and the lack of an automated platform. Embee implemented Azure DevOps to build an automated platform that allowed multiple developers to work on the same code at the same time.
Technologies used for the solution
The solution provided by Embee used different tools including Azure DevOps, GitHub, and ARM (Azure Resource Management) template.
We created CI and CD to check-in and check-out from the source code pipeline that accounted for publishing the source code. We also created the Git repository which is called the bank of source code. The repository had all the code stored to enable multiple developers to work at the same time
Additionally, we utilized several Azure services like Azure Kubernetes and Azure Functions while implementing DevOps practices. We also used the tools while re-architecting the system for scalability, manageability, high availability.
Embee focused on highest-value automation opportunities to be the most productive way forward. Their business applications that were crucial to the functioning were of the highest priority. These were Visa Management System (VMS), Admin Invoice Tracker, and few more of such applications.
With the above-mentioned technologies, developers incorporated into their IT architectures sophisticated automated testing, such as verifying an end-to-end user journey. They also used performance tests that aimed to measure the system under load or stress or required security fixes. Every “merge” of new code into the mainline source code triggered these tests and the deployment of the latest code to low-risk test environments.
Impact of the solution:
“In terms of coding, the process was the same. The real change we saw was in the review process which was manually done before. The impact was in the lead time for the infrastructure as it would have taken a day, now it takes a couple of hours only. Release time also reduced by 7 working days to 2 working days as things are automated now.”
– Guruprasad, Associate Vice President
The new solution enabled the team of developers to track the code, make changes in source code, and upload them again. Thus, Embee helped merge together development and operations in an agile manner and enabled them to have transparent accountability for the full end-to-end software development process. Here’s more about how they had cut down on the costs and time:
| Process | Time taken (Earlier) | Time taken (Now) |
| Code review process | 1 day | 2 hours |
| Unit testing (Automated) | 3 days | 2 hours |
| Code release (Automated) | 5-7 days | 2 days |
According to Guruprasad, “Now the entire process is automatic, like check-in and check out of code happens automatically and the notifications are triggered to the supervisors, who validate the build. After that, it goes into the testing process and scanning happens to ensure there is no error.”
The benefits of the solution include:
- Reduced the time-to-market
- Reduced costs
- Improved overall quality of the applications built
- Standard security, quick release time, good processes across IT and teams
- Automation improved operational support and faster fixes
- Reduced testing automation and uninterrupted business continuity
Besides building the platform, the team Embee trained the users (developers) to adopt the new platform.
Way forward
Before opting for Microsoft Azure DevOps, the enterprise was stuck in a technology that was based on the “waterfall” model of software development. This model followed sluggish, rigid stages wherein a project went from development to testing to quality assurance to integration to production.
Leveraging the cloud for the digital transformation required some crucial technology decisions, especially to take care of certain important cultural and organizational challenges. By adopting the DevOps solution, the company could abandon the sluggish ways and it became the most important event of their digital transformation journey.
The best thing about the solution developed by Embee is that the same architecture can be repeated with different codes. Embee could replicate the solution for other customers using different codes. The company developed similar solutions for FCB Ulka.
As the company’s continuous-delivery capabilities mature, they can now shift their focus from automating development workflows to improving system scalability, resilience, and disaster recovery, as well as optimizing the monitoring and logging of systems to better track user and system performance. Product teams can then learn and make decisions quickly based on the data that affect the customer experience and performance.
Embee is a recognized leading technology partner in India with 34+ years of experience in delivering digital transformation to its 2000+ customers. We are uniquely positioned to empower businesses to be more with Cloud and Datacentre Technologies enabling them to leverage the latest resources on various cloud platforms while optimizing costs, through application modernization and serverless computing.
For your cloud solutions query, reach out to us at connect@embee.co.in
