One of the world’s pioneering energy companies embarked on a transformative journey to modernise its development infrastructure with an Internal Developer Platform (IDP).
This case study explores how the organisation tackled key challenges to remove barriers, streamline workflows, and improve developer productivity.
The challenge
The company’s development environment presented several obstacles that impacted team efficiency and overall productivity:
- Lengthy Provisioning Times: Development resources often took excessive time to provision, leading to delays and bottlenecks.
- Cumbersome Processes: Resource allocation relied on complex, manual workflows, adding unnecessary friction to the development process.
- Extended Onboarding: New projects faced onboarding times of 4–6 weeks, delaying time-to-productivity for developers.
- Inconsistent Practices Across Teams: Varied development practices led to inconsistencies and technical drift from organisational standards.
- High Cognitive Load: Engineers were required to manage knowledge across multiple domains, increasing their cognitive load.
- Increased Support Overhead: Complex infrastructure needs led to elevated support requirements, which stretched engineering resources.
The solution journey
The company engaged RiverSafe to collaborate with its DevOps team on a multi-phased journey toward an automated, developer-friendly platform.
Phase 1: OpenShift implementation
The initial phase involved adopting OpenShift to simplify cloud operations and establish a unified framework:
- Pre-Configured Workspaces: Provided developers with pre-configured environments, reducing setup time and manual tasks.
- Automated Provisioning: Automated the allocation of resources, removing manual paperwork and streamlining workflows.
- Security and Observability Enhancements: Embedded platform-wide security guardrails and introduced tools for chaos engineering and observability.
- CI/CD Pipeline Automation: Established automated continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to accelerate deployment cycles.
Phase 2: Building the full IDP
Building on the OpenShift foundation, the organisation worked on creating a comprehensive IDP designed to:
- Simplify Deployments: Introduced one-click deployment capabilities to enable rapid iteration and deployment.
- Enable GitOps and Monitoring: Integrated tools like ArgoCD and Crossplane for GitOps, and Grafana and Loki for real-time monitoring.
- Streamline Resilience and Testing: Added advanced testing tools, including ChaosMesh for resilience testing and PACT for contract testing.
- Standardise Development Workflows: Established standardised resource definitions and centralised operational management to ensure consistency.
Results to date
Quantitative improvements
- Deployment Time Reduction: Cut deployment times from 2 weeks to 2 minutes, dramatically speeding up the development cycle.
- Faster Onboarding: Reduced onboarding time from 4–6 weeks to just 30 minutes, enabling new projects to start quickly.
- Lower Support Overhead: Streamlined processes and automation have significantly reduced support requirements.
Qualitative benefits
- Standardised Developer Experience: Created a more consistent, efficient environment for developers across teams.
- Reduced Cognitive Load: Engineers can now focus on core development tasks instead of juggling multiple domains.
- Enhanced Security and Compliance: Automated guardrails ensure compliance and improve security practices.