Success story
BP modernizes infrastructure, introduces DevOps with self-service platform
- Industry: Oil and gas
- Region: EMEA
- Location: London, England
- Company size: 74,000 employees in more than 70 countries
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform gives us the ability to safely manage tens of thousands of microservices at scale. I don’t see any other container platforms that can do that as safely and securely as OpenShift.
BP is a global energy company that explores for and produces oil and gas and manufacturers and markets fuels, lubricants, and petrochemicals—all with a focus on lowering carbon emissions to protect the planet. BP needed a reliable, modern technology infrastructure to speed application development and deployment. It worked with Red Hat to simplify and modernize technology and processes, increasing security and agility and speeding provisioning from 2-3 weeks to 7 minutes.
2019 Red Hat Innovation Awards winner
The path to success
Challenge: Modernize a complex technology infrastructure
BP had a complex operational management approach with hundreds of product teams using various delivery models, which affected application development and deployment. To deliver on its dual challenge of meeting the world’s increasing demand for more energy while producing fewer emissions, BP wanted to explore a robust, modern, open source technology infrastructure that could operate worldwide and be accessed by thousands of business users and millions of end customers. “We wanted to develop a strategic platform to support internal development and accelerate that development from initial investigation and innovation through production,” said Paul Costall, head of application engineering services at BP.
Solution: Build a self-service platform and a DevOps culture
To simplify processes and enhance productivity, BP used Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build the Application Engineering Services’ Digital Conveyor. This platform provides process automation that empowers product delivery teams with self-service capabilities, a DevOps approach, and a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. “The combination of microservices, containers, and a fully automated CI/CD platform provides what developers have been asking for for years,” said Costall. “They now have full self-service to deliver change from the initial idea, through the innovation, right through to production, as quickly as humanly possible.”
Results: Increase agility, security, and speed to market—at scale
With the Digital Conveyor platform, BP can now provision a new environment in 7 minutes, instead of 2-3 weeks, allowing developers to innovate quickly and better support business goals. The new platform also runs security scans on every build and container, rather than static scans based on project milestones. “Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform gives us the ability to safely manage tens of thousands of microservices at scale,” said Costall. “I don’t see any other container platforms that can do that as safely and securely as OpenShift.” Also, the platform empowers DevOps teams to embrace self-service. “We used to think, ‘There’s the business. There’s architecture. There’s developers. There’s support,’” said Bruno Rothgiesser, digital solutions architect at BP. “Now it’s just one team, co-creating software and digital capabilities. That’s a big change—a big, positive transformation in the way we work.”
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The power of the partnership with Red Hat came through our co-creation and collaboration and their understanding of our complex problems. The combination of those minds, and the open thinking of those minds, is what the strength of the partnership is all about.