Organization

Telecommunications Company

‍

Business

A leading diversifed communications company providing broadband cable television, Internet, digital phone, telecommunications, and satellite direct-to-home (DTH) services.

‍

Solution

Implemented an innovative DevOps solution using MyST to automate and standardizeprovisioning, deployment and confguration of Oracle Middlewarereleases and applications onto Oracle Exalogic, delivering an enterprise-class Private Middleware Platform as a Service.

‍

Oracle Products

• Oracle Exalogic X5-2 and X2-2

• Oracle Trafc Director

• Oracle WebLogic Server 11g

• Oracle SOA Suite 11g

• Oracle Service Bus 11g

• Oracle Web Services Manager 11g

• Oracle API Gateway 11g

• Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g

• Oracle Database Enterprise Edition

• Technology Adapters (Database, JMS and File)

‍

Results

• Automating provisioning of 24 environments, 72 domains, 24 Web tiers, across multiple sites.

• Provision environments 40+ times faster – ~90 minutes with MyST vs manual 1.5+ weeks.

• Cut time to release from ~30 hours, manually, to ~90 minutes using MyST - more than 20 times faster.

• Improved developer productivity by ~25% by leveraging Continuous Delivery, and having Dev/Test environments that are consistent with Production.

• Improved test team productivity and reduction in idle time due to elimination of confguration drift.

‍

Focus on Growth and Innovation

With focus on growth and innovation in the business, this leading telecommunications company has embarked on an extensive integration modernization program to simplify the back ofce integration landscape by moving from a point-to-point architecture for systems integration, to one that is modern, standards-based and future-proof. By promoting re-use, visibility and efciency across development projects, the new SOA architecture ultimately provides IT the agility to keep pace with the phenomenal rate of innovation, in the way of new product releases and launches, being driven by the business.

To support this rapid rate of innovation in the business, the organization established 5 concurrent development teams. However, with this many development teams in place, the business was fnding the bottleneck in bringing new releases to market had in fact shifted from development, to operations. When they frst embarked on this project, they were using a semi-automated/semi-manual approach for standing up new environments leveraging a base gold image to provision middleware environments onto Oracle Exalogic and then manually applying any additional confgurations. With every release the gold images became further out of synch, continually requiring further manual efort to document and apply additional confgurations. This manual provisioning process was taking ~1.5+ weeks and growing with every new release.

DevOps to Reduce Complexity

With 5 concurrent development teams spanning 24 distinct environments including 5 streams of development (DEV/INTDEV/QA), 3 System Integration Testing environments, a performance environment and dual Pre and Prod environments, the project team quickly realized they needed to have an enterprise-class platform to support concurrent release cycles across multiple projects. Using MyST, they are implementing an innovative DevOps approach to automate the provisioning, deployment and confguration of middleware releases onto Oracle Exalogic. This solution enables them to deliver an enterprise-class Private Middleware Platform as a Service, running on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, in multiple Data Centers. Automated Platform Provisioning and Confguration, MyST provides a standardized, repeatable and automated process to consistently provision, confgure and manage their extensive Oracle Middleware environments.

MyST uses a unique Platform Blueprint to defne a standardized topology across all 24 environments. This is critical to providing governance and consistency and eliminating confguration drift across all phases of the development cycle. Typically, using a manual approach, it was taking at least 1.5+ weeks to stand up a single production like environment, primarily due to all the additional confgurations that needed to be applied post-provisioning.

Using MyST to deploy each environment takes ~90 minutes, drastically shrinking the time to provision all 24 environments to 34 hours. The results are compelling - 1.5 days using MyST vs ~250 person-days, manually. The declarative approach means incremental confguration changes are simple to make and propagate across all 24 environments. They just update the required target state; MyST will determine and perform the required steps to apply the necessary changes. With MyST there is no need to maintain manual change documentation, complicated scripts or workfows for each confguration change, thereby eliminating errors and simplifying on-going maintenance.

Continuous Delivery

With 120+ services in production and 4-5 production releases every year, this organization wanted to automate the build and deployment process to establish a standardized, repeatable and automated process, across all 24 environments. With approximately 6 releases each month, taking between 4-16 hours manually, depending, on the size of the code release, and the environment – the manual efort quickly becomes untenable. With releases taking less than 1.5 hours to deploy using MyST, and ~30 hours per release, manually, MyST delivers releases more than 20 times faster.

Production Re-sync to Eliminate Confguration Drift

Issues caused by confguration drift are often the most difcult to diagnose and can result in many wasted months of efort to resolve. With 5 Development and 3 SIT streams running in parallel, a key requirement was to ensure that each non-prod environment is fully aligned with production, in terms of confguration, patches and code deployed, to eliminate issues caused by confguration drift. Prior to adopting MyST this was never feasible, so they experienced many issues caused by confguration drift that resulted in wasted time and efort trying to troubleshoot and resolve issues. At a minimum, this means that each time a new release goes into production, the same release needs to be consistently released into the other 23 environments. Using the manual approach, this was simply not able scale to 5 development streams.

Using MyST, they are now able to re-provision NON-PROD environments in ~90 minutes, these can be scheduled to run over night. This ensures that all environments are fully aligned with the latest production release.

Result

Implementing a fully automated Private Middleware Platform as a Service combined with automated Release Management has resulted in faster project start up time, improved developer and test team productivity and less confguration issues. Using MyST, they have transformed a semi-manual, time consuming, complex, error prone process into an automated, predictable, scalable process that can support concurrent release cycles across multiple projects.

This gives them the agility needed to deliver multiple new projects, supporting new product releases and launches, to meet the aggressive go-to-market timelines demanded by the business, while concurrently minimizing costs.

‍