Last Updated May 09, 2016 — DevOps Expert
How Medecision Radically Improved Their Software Delivery
DevOps
Medecision recently undertook a large transformation to migrate to a new cloud-based infrastructure. Driving the transformation was the need to migrate two non-cloud-based data centers to the cloud, in order to fashion a 100% software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model.
The Challenges Facing Medecision
“Medecision’s biggest challenge was finding a way to move from a deployment process that was mostly manual to full automation,” said Zach Penska, Senior Manager of DevOps for Medecision. “As we migrated to a SaaS organization and delivery model, we needed to transform our internal process or we would not be able to scale.” Software releases were manual, slow, complex and error-prone.Before the shift to automated deployment, eight people worked for 48 hours to upgrade 6 applications – that’s more than 3,000 minutes per environment.- Manual methods of deploying new releases were slow and inefficient
- Process would not scale to accommodate new SaaS model
- No way to create release reports and analyze release metrics
- Poor coordination of tasks in the delivery pipeline caused extensive delay
The Solution
After five months of evaluating various vendors’ solutions, notably Ansible, CA Release Automation, Chef, Puppet, and XebiaLabs, Medecision chose XebiaLabs’ XL Release to manage release pipelines and XL Deploy to automate deployments for all of their SaaS applications. They found that provisioning tools such as Ansible, Chef and Puppet did a great job of provisioning, but provisioning was not the business problem they were trying to solve.“We chose XebiaLabs because it best met our business need to focus on release automation rather than the provisioning process,” said John Lysen, CIO of Medecision.
1000x Faster Deployments
XebiaLabs enabled Medecision to jump-start its SaaS strategy, replacing all-manual software delivery with full automation.It now takes 2 hours to upgrade 50 apps. That’s less than 3 minutes per environment. And only 2 people are involved.XebiaLabs products provide powerful benefits for Medecision:- Greatly accelerated application deployments that are now completely scalable
- Seamless orchestration of all elements in the software delivery process
- Reliable software deployments with minimal errors
- Real-time visibility into status and metrics for all components in the delivery process