Overview
Our client is a telco giant with over 110 million subscribers; it also hosts mobile-virtual network operators. To stay competitive, they needed to speed up their development process.
HCLTech, with our deep domain expertise and stellar credentials, was the telco’s preferred partner for an agile DevOps transformation.
The Challenge
An inffective, costly development cycle
The client's development cycle faced several inefficiencies in continuous testing and delivery, leading to an ineffective process. Furthermore, the telco encountered multiple challenges, including an inflexible legacy architecture that hindered their growth.
- Inefficient release management: The telco’s rigid frameworks caused long release windows, service downtimes and fewer iterations, resulting in high costs and long delivery times.
- Delivery misalignment: Duplication of application development and the lack of a unified approach led to poor cross-functional communication and several roadblocks in the delivery process. The manual workflow, coupled with an unresponsive infrastructure, led to overproduction and misaligned deliveries.
- Lack of system modernization:
- A monolithic architecture-based system led to an absence of continuous integration and deployment, increasing fragility
- The absence of a unified platform for building, testing and deployment caused poor visibility
- Siloed data created setbacks in implementing even small changes to the code
- CI/CD pipeline issues:
- Our client wasn’t leveraging best practices for app delivery and they didn’t have an agile CI/CD pipeline that would allow app development teams to make reliable code changes
- The source code repository wasn’t updated automatically or in real-time
- Tools were neither standardized nor automated across pipelines
- High cost and increased maintenance: The telco had not prioritized full-stack automation and as a result of the ad hoc management process, they were encountering significant issues including high costs and increased maintenance requirements.
The Objective
Scalable and agile DevOps cycle to boost efficiency
The telco entrusted HCLTech with providing direction and implementing a solution for its system development and growth imperatives. The HCLTech team proposed improving their software delivery cycle by using DevOps, which would bring together and align the development and operations teams. To achieve this, we proposed automating the process to make it more efficient and reduce errors caused by manual tasks.
The solution
The DevOps-led digital axiom for next-gen mobile networks
HCLTech’s DevOps approach helped the client transition from a conventional waterfall model to a fully agile enterprise delivery system. HCLTech modernized and transformed our client’s legacy core using containerization, orchestration, cloudification and enterprise CI/CD tools. Our primary strategy was to break down large applications into smaller, more manageable microservices for faster development and deployment.
The transformation included:
- Automation
- Adoption of the cloud
- CI/CD best practices
- Continuous feedback loops
- Improved testing environments
The impact
Amped-up productivity
As a result of HCLTech’s solution, our client realized immediate positive outcomes in three crucial areas:
- People: The new collaborative framework featuring automation and containerized platforms led to happier developers and higher CSAT scores. This also championed SDETs as embedded engineers who build a bridge between app development (AD) and quality engineering (QE) early in the product lifecycle
- Process: Freedom was extended to QE, allowing HCLTech to propose model-based testing (MBT) for enterprise testing.
- Technology: Automation improved CI/CD practices and led to efficient testing and on-demand release delivery.
This transformation also empowered our client to:
- Adopt new technologies that moved our client away from a traditional relational database management system (RDBMS) and TIBCO layer, which present severe limitations when scaling to the cloud.
- Move away from vendor lock-in, which incurs huge proprietary software and licensing costs. This allowed them to embrace FLOSS technologies at a fraction of their original support cost and offered them the freedom to own source code.
Key outcomes and business benefits
The impact of HCLTech’s DevOps approach to release management was direct and tangible. Adoption of the auto-deployment tool increased release frequency from 12 to 740 times a year, release time dropped by 30% and rollbacks were reduced from 5% to zero.
The telco’s new, dependable release management model helped our client introduce blue/green environment implementation by switching VM stacks in production, which allows seamless, real-time deployment of micro-components. It also enables optional deployment of the canary technique for graduated releases in production.
HCLTech also powered the telco’s growth and productivity by:
- Expanding the telco’s DevOps mindset to foster ownership of building, testing and deploying across environments, which enhanced delivery alignment.
- Resolving the CI/CD pipeline issues by enhancing CI/CD pipelines, moving CI/CD to a SaaS platform and connecting practices.
- Automating the true-up tool led to a 90% reduction in time for creating non-production and lower environments. It also increased agility via on-demand environment creation.
- Reducing outage windows from 12-14 hours to 4-6 hours.
- Centralizing the repository that contains details of IT systems dependencies, assets and configuration, which lowered environment setup costs by reducing configuration environment incidents by 50%.
- Automating sanity testing triggered by code drops
- Facilitating fully compliant documentation
