CASE STUDY the developers who created and deployed the builds weren ’ t familiar with the organizational security and compliance standards or the resulting cost to the company of manual change management and slow deployments – so we started to seek out new solutions that could streamline the deployments .”
As part of its Digital Transformation efforts and migration to the cloud , United moved from monolithic applications to microservices , turning a single monolith deployment process into hundreds of independently deployable microservices .
This required a massive increase in scalability and legacy tools couldn ’ t cope . To adapt , United ’ s DevOps team started listing deployment requirements , detailing gaps and creating an inventory of existing tools used across its software delivery process .
With United working to shift security and testing earlier in the development process , it also needed guardrails to make sure that processes were followed and governance controls were in place . After evaluating multiple continuous integration and continuous delivery ( CI / CD ) tools , United chose Harness .
“ None of the other tools we evaluated could give us the ‘ shift left ’ approach that we needed ,” said Devarapalli . “ By choosing Harness for CI and CD , we were able to give the governance policies to the developers and create the guardrails we needed . Harness gives us a platform rather than just a DevOps tool .”
United implemented Harness CI / CD to enable developers to execute more self-service deployments . Simply by creating a help ticket ,
OUR LEGACY TOOLS REQUIRED A LOT OF MANUAL CONFIGURATION AND WE HAD LONG WAIT TIMES BECAUSE THEY TOOK TOO MUCH TIME TO COMMIT THE CODE , CREATE AN IMAGE AND DEPLOY IT TO AN ENVIRONMENT .
Harness kicks off automation to manage the delivery process with minimal manual intervention required . This accelerates deployments , as well as enables United to scale its delivery process by running deployment pipelines in parallel .
“ We were pushing our teams to migrate to the cloud , but that has a chain of dependencies , and developers had to move much faster ,” Koppala said . “ Harness gave us a lot of best practices right out of the box with reusable templates so developers don ’ t need to perform any guesswork to determine how the best pipeline should be built .”
This simplified developer experience and faster timeto-value with Harness helping maximize developer productivity and efficiency at United .
United developers now use Harness CI to simply select a template and start building a new pipeline or to generate pipelines dynamically for each new service . Harness automates reporting to remove manual effort from the developers ’ workloads and free up time to focus on more value-add tasks , such as working on new feature developments related to the United Next initiative .
“ We started using Harness CI and CD to automatically generate pipelines , use pre-built pipelines and optimize our deployment process ,” Koppala said .
With Harness , United has automated its delivery and deployment processes to enable developers with a self-service approach for deployment , increase compliance with governance policies and processes and dramatically accelerate its software deployment cycles . Harness is now a critical component in helping DevOps keep the company moving toward its United Next goals .
“ The most exciting feature of Harness is on-demand automation ,” said Koppala . “ Our delivery processes are now more dynamic and developer friendly . Harness has eliminated most of the manual co-ordination we used to do . It ’ s really enabled us to scale all parts of our delivery process .”
Deployment speed has been enhanced as well . Prior to Harness , a CI pipeline build for an airport operation application took nearly 22 minutes . Now , it ’ s done in under five minutes for the exact same code .
Moreover , teams can build microservices in parallel without unnecessary testing of the services not affected by the new code . Harness also enables developers to orchestrate deployments and sequentially deliver builds as they like .
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