[DevOps case study] Punchh achieved zero-touch CI/CD and DevOps as-code in less than a month.

Do you know most companies adopt hashtag#DevOps in an ad-hoc fashion, without a clear roadmap or strategic plan?
We recently came across a digital marketing platform company, Punchh, which was struggling because of this.

In the words of Punchh CTO Aditya Sanghi: “We lacked a clear CI/CD strategy and our automation was too people-dependent and custom. As a result, onboarding new customers or making changes to existing services required a lot of custom work and our environments and configs were prone to drifts. We needed a way to keep up with a rapidly growing customer base without burning out the team.”

Aditya started looking for a CI/CD platform that would provide them with zero-touch automation and economies of scale as they accelerated their growth.

With Shippable, he found a team that took the approach of “solving the problem together” as opposed to just “selling a platform.” The result? Zero-touch automation across all services and customer deployments in less than one month, while shrinking automation codebase by 80% and increasing deployment speed by 5x.

Results

With Shippable, the Punchh team achieved zero-touch automation with a streamlined toolchain in less than 1 month. Some highlights of the new CI/CD automation workflows are:

1. Customer on-boarding takes less than one day, during which the Punchh team team can bring up a brand new instance of their service. This was reduced from 2-3 weeks of effort.
2. Deployment reliability has gone up 80 %, and time spent in debugging release issues has reduced by 4x.
3. Automation code reuse has gone from ~10% to 95%.
4. Adding new workflows or changing existing ones takes less than half a day, down from 2-3 weeks.
5. Ramp up time for new developers has gone from months to less than 1 week.
6. Docker build performance has improved 400%, from 120 mins/day to 30 mins/day.

The complete case study is here

How are you doing DevOps at your organization?
Do you have a systematic road-map and a startegic plan?

Comments

[Mihail Malo]

This is just result metrics.
Can you please clarify on what Shippable does better than others?
Or more prudently, what else you considered and what made you reject it?

[Pavan Belagatti]

I am from Shippable. Well, most of them claim themselves as a DevOps tool, but very fewer tools go beyond CI. Shippable helps you automate deployments across successive environments (like Dev, Test, Staging, Prod), manage releases with semantic versioning and approval gates, automate infrastructure provisioning, view and manage pipelines across your organization, and perform a host of other DevOps activities. Most of the companies now do DevOps in an ad-hoc fashion connecting different tools together, but Shippable is an all in one tool. This sounds too kind of advertising but ya, since you asked, I am saying all this.

The DevOps team at Punchh cobbled together a process that consisted of many different tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, and Amazon services (Lambda, ECS, and ECR) for CI and deployments, CloudFormations for infrastructure provisioning, and several homegrown bash scripts and manual steps. While this approach worked for a first few customer installations, they quickly realized that their approach did not scale as Punchh’s business grew rapidly.