Feature delivery time drops from months to weeks with CI/CD and self service
The iterative, modular structure of Red Hat OpenShift containers, combined with modern development tools, has helped Westech establish a CI/CD pipeline for application code. OpenShift Dedicated supports the development team’s choice of tools, including the Go programming language, Argo CD declarative GitOps tool, and the Tekton open source CI/CD framework. Now, team members can shift between projects or more easily collaborate. Self-service provisioning also helps Westech’s developers provision databases or environments independent from the IT operations team, minimizing delivery times.
“During the hackathon, our more traditional Java developers who were used to waiting three months for a physical server or Java environment setup saw that they could get a new development environment in just ten minutes with OpenShift Dedicated,” said Kelliher.
As a result, new features can now be delivered in just a few months, instead of more than a year. For example, the company recently used the Couchbase JSON NoSQL database tool, running in OpenShift Dedicated, to create Contactly, a customer service application that helps its call centers handle interactions more efficiently.
“We’re getting closer to our vision of a DevOps approach. With more independence and standardization, IT operations is now seen less as a controlling gatekeeper function and more as a supportive partner for developers,” said Kelliher. “From writing code to committing, testing, scanning, deploying, and getting it to release, we cut our lead time from six months to six weeks.”
OpenShift and AWS boost system scalability and reliability—at lower cost
Previously, high traffic from successful client marketing campaigns risked outages on Westech’s servers. To accommodate this demand, the company would add servers to WMC as needed—increasing operating costs by maintaining more than 1,200 virtual servers, many sitting mostly unused.
By combining the modular Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated with an easy-to-scale AWS cloud, Westech can now rapidly scale its server environment up or down as needed to respond to campaign traffic. At the same time, the company has cut its number of physical servers by 50%, improving operating expenditure (OpEx).
“We’re now more confident that our production environment can handle the high volume of traffic we hope our clients’ campaigns experience,” said Kelliher. “For example, if one called us and said they have 600,000 attendees on a webinar, we can temporarily scale WMC up to ensure there are no lags or performance issues.”
Expanded business capabilities to support new market demands
In addition to helping its clients meet complex direct marketing needs faster, Westech can now help them take advantage of intelligent data insights, such as behavioral analytics, to segment and address their customer bases.
“By replacing our monolithic platforms using Red Hat OpenShift, we have been able to build an environment that lets us take advantage of machine learning to collect customer data points and actions into a data platform that gives us a single picture of the customer,” said Kelliher. “We can then better predict their behavior and target marketing to reach them.”