The Client and Opportunity
A leading provider of cloud-based accounting solutions recognised the need to bolster the capacity and expertise within their Managed Sales DevOps team.
With a strong foundation in AWS cloud and DevOps, the organisation’s engineering team was well-positioned to support multiple development teams. To accelerate improvements to the development environment and meet growing demand, there was an opportunity to augment the team with additional expertise and capacity. Expanding the team’s capabilities and capacity would not only enhance support for development teams but also enable a greater focus on driving critical enhancements while reducing reliance on a single engineer and mitigating key person risk. The organisation recognised a clear opportunity to augment the team, alleviate pressure, and dedicate resources to focus on key improvements.
The Approach
The organisation partnered with ClearPoint to augment its DevOps team with three additional engineers for nine months. This collaboration enabled the team to accelerate critical improvements, enhance system resilience, and support large-scale development initiatives.
Key initiatives included:
- CI/CD Pipeline Migration & Optimisation:
- Migrated CI/CD pipelines to GitHub Actions which streamlined the development workflow.
- Optimised existing pipelines within the TeamCity CI/CD environment, achieving notable performance gains.
- Reduced the End-to-End Testing pipeline runtime for a core invoicing system from 30 minutes to just 6 minutes.
- Infrastructure Modernisation:
- Successfully migrated a critical component, previously constrained by an outdated framework, to Terraform. This enabled a crucial upgrade that had been stalled for five years.
- Developed a template accelerator for AWS Lambda, empowering developers to build serverless components, further enhancing efficiency and capability.
- Operational Support & Large-Scale Migrations:
- Provided essential technical support and expertise during both minor and major production incidents.
- Played a pivotal role in planned large-scale component migrations to enhance system stability and performance.
The Outcome
The collaboration with ClearPoint yielded significant improvements across the client's development environment and processes. These key outcomes demonstrate the success of this strategic partnership:
- Improved Development Workflow: Migrating all Managed Sales codebases to the correct GitHub Cloud location and implementing automated access role creation significantly improved the development workflow.
- Enhanced Pipeline Performance: The optimisation of CI/CD pipelines, including the notable reduction in runtime for the core invoicing system pipeline, brought about substantial efficiency gains.
- Modernised Infrastructure: Migrating components to Terraform enabled upgrades and enhanced the maintainability of the company's infrastructure.
- Increased Resilience: The ClearPoint team's support during production incidents and migrations contributed to the resilience of the company's systems.
- Accelerated Development: The provision of a new template repository for AWS Lambda functions streamlined the development process.
Thank you [ClearPoint team], your contributions can't be overstated. …you've been so critical to unlocking a stronger foundation for us to carry on with.”
- Head of Engineering at the Leading Cloud-Based Accounting Solution Provider
Conclusion
This collaboration proved highly successful. By supplementing the client’s internal capabilities, ClearPoint enabled the achievement of key DevOps initiatives, resulting in significant improvements in development workflows, pipeline performance, and infrastructure modernisation. The partnership not only offered crucial support during critical production events but also facilitated effective knowledge transfer to strengthen the team’s expertise.
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