5 Companies That Are Nailing It With DevOps

Last Updated on: July 5, 2022

In our last blog, we explained how DevOps empowers businesses to offer 100% satisfaction to their customers. But don’t you want to know which are these businesses that are leveraging DevOps to engage and retain their customers? You do, right. 

Here in the blog, we are bringing you the 5 companies using DevOps and nailing it. Let’s dive to learn from the ones who are doing it right.

1.Netflix

If you are a startup or small business that is in a dilemma of investing in DevOps infrastructure, then Netflix’s story might help you in finding a better answer.

Challenges Faced:

Netflix started its journey as a DVD rental business, and when it evolved into an over-the-top content platform, it faced a major challenge as there were not any commercial tools available to run the company’s massive cloud infrastructure smoothly. Hence, the company resorted to open source solutions. 

How DevOps helped?

With the volunteer help of hundreds of developers, Netflix created the Simian Army, a set of automated tools that enabled the brand to proactively identify and resolve bugs and errors before they cause inconvenience to subscribers.

Later, Netflix also developed a container management tool called Titus. This tool runs existing applications without any need for changing in the container, thus, eliminating scaling issues. Titus helps Netflix with recommendations, streaming and content system.

Netflix has continued its commitment to open source and automation, since the time it morphed to a video streaming platform from the DVD business and stands amongst the top companies using DevOps services. In the year 2015, Netflix was unanimously selected for the JAX Special Jury Award, where the JAXenter editor Coman Hamilton commented,” The rate at which this entertainment game-changer has adopted new technologies and implemented them into its DevOps approach is setting new standards in IT.

2.Walmart:

Challenges Faced

Walmart faced cut-throat competition with Amazon and struggled a lot to become the leader in the retailing industry.

How DevOps helped?

To beat Amazon and emerge as one of the biggest retailers, Walmart assembled a cutting-edge team and founded WalmartLabs, the technology and development branch in the year 2011.

WalmartLabs developed a new open-source DevOps platform, called OneOps, for cloud and application lifecycle management (ALM). This cloud-based technology:

• Worked with multiple private and public platforms including Rackspace, AWS, Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink Cloud and more.
• Worked with RDMS and NoSQL Databases, Docker, ElasticSearch, Databases and many others.
• Integrated with quota management, configuration management and enterprise identity services.
• Was released to the public at the beginning of the year 2016.

OneOps’ offers end-to-end automated orchestration, can deploy new environments in minutes and offers flexible orchestration of changes. The tool helps the operation by bringing synchronized environments, smart auto repair and auto-scale, monitoring and real-time cost visibility.

WalmartLabs’ invention not only helped Walmart in acquiring the ground as the leading retailers, but it has also deployed more than 100,000 cores of OpenStack on its compute layer. Walmart Labs continues to evolve its agile approach by building a private cloud and public cloud scale.

3.Facebook:

Challenge:

Facebook also followed traditional monolithic architecture during its initial years, but it soon started practising Automation and Continuous Improvement (two major pillars of DevOps) which makes its model worth following.

How DevOps helped?

Facebook started working on the major principles of DevOps – code ownership, automation, incremental changes and continuous improvement even when the company didn’t know that these are interconnected agendas that come under the umbrella of DevOps services. 

The mobile revolution has completely changed the way we interact with software and brands like Facebook have set audience expectations high when it comes to new updates and fixation of bugs. For instance, the Facebook mobile app is updated and refreshed every two weeks without any fail. That’s the new normal. The users today expect apps/software to be fixed and updated regularly. And, a company that takes months to update new features or fix bugs will be soon lost into obscurity.

Facebook continues to adopt new DevOps tools and strategies for smoother development and quick delivery process.

4.Etsy

Etsy describes itself as an online marketplace where people can connect to buy and sell unique goods. The e-commerce platform focuses mainly on handmade or vintage items and craft supplies. Founded in 2005, the company latched onto the concepts of DevOps early and today it can keep pace with the rapid business growth.

Challenges Faced:

The traditional silos and barriers within the company due to the traditional approach, made Etsy face a lot of distrust between different teams. The engineering department put a lot of effort into building a middle layer to allow developers to connect with databases in faster and scalable ways. However, it worked opposite to what expected and created barriers between database engineers and developers.

How DevOps helped?

With the help of its new technical team, Etsy made a shift from the waterfall model to a more agile approach. Today, Etsy is renowned for its DevOps and practices of Continuous Delivery, doing 50 deployments/day. And to achieve this rate of change, Etsy has implemented a fully automated deployment pipeline, IRC-based collaboration and thorough application monitoring. This is why Etsy is one of the names in our list of companies using DevOps services and nailing it.

There are on-call policies for departments of operations, development, support and payment. Developers connect over a call once every four weeks to keep everyone aware of the issues the site faces and what all-new features, bugs removal and improvements need to be performed to enhance existing functionalities. 

It is the DevOps approach that empowers Etsy to manage 60+ monthly visits and 1.5+ billion page views per month like a piece of cake.

5. Adobe:

Adobe Creative cloud comprises a set of services that enables users to work on different software applications such as Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator.

Challenges Faced:

• Initially, Adobe employed the monolithic architecture which made communication between the team point-to-point
• As load grew rapidly on these platforms, it slowed down the delivery process and made it difficult to simultaneously manage several deployments.

How DevOps helped?

Adobe employed DevOps’ microservices, containers and CI/CD to speed up the software delivery process. Apache Kafka based message bus is known as “Adobe Experience Platform Pipeline” is employed for communication across Adobe solutions. The goal of this pipeline was to break internal silos and simplify communication between different processes by reducing the number of manual steps.

The messages received by the pipeline are replicated across Adobe data centres as well as 13 data centres in AWS and Azure. This helps Adobe achieve faster silos, faster delivery and better management across products. With DevOps implementation, Adobe has been able to achieve 60% more development demand from the business, according to Ryan Granard, VP of cloud operations at Adobe.

Now that you have gone through the list of companies using DevOps, you must have understood how DevOps brings a magnificent transition in your software development process. 

Let’s further explore why DevOps and why now?

Why DevOps?

Vinita Rathi, CEO and co-founder of Systango, DevOps Consultancy, London explains that “Agile and DevOps is crucial to mobile app development where you need faster deployment cycles. As software development and operations become more closely intertwined, it has become imperative for businesses to rely on cloud infrastructure. This will enable teams to perform at their full potential and remain ahead of the competition.”

The world of mobile apps is prompt. Born out of the success of Amazon, Google, Facebook and others, DevOps delivers quick and robust applications. Companies that include DevOps in their lifecycle experience loads of benefits, such as:

• Sixty-three percent of organizations, which employ DevOps have experienced increased software releases.
• In 2013, the DevOps team reported that they are able to spend thirty-three percent more time on improving infrastructure.
• Teams using DevOps spend 60% less time handling support cases.

Choosing DevOps: Why to Make it Soon?

Choosing DevOps is no more a choice. According to the US Small Business Administration data, only 16% of the companies starting today will survive beyond a generation. For software development companies, DevOps is not a process that can be considered later. If they don’t adopt DevOps practices, they will soon become extinct.

Today, we live in a consumer-driven world, where we continuously innovate and keep products updated with better usability and features. And DevOps is an operational shift that can help us achieve greater velocity, safer operations, and satisfied customers.

Why Systango as your DevOps Service Provider?

• We create the standard DevOps setup by creating the pilot framework
• As your DevOps service provider, we integrate your existing tools with our existing ecosystem of licensed and open source tools.
• Make DevOps end-to-end by integrating continuous planning, integration, testing and deployment for each project.
• Helps in building infrastructure, managing system reliability and enhancing people, processes, culture, and tools.
• Assess the current state of DevOps culture, and processes and quantify your maturity model.
• Our DevOps engineer creates a roadmap after DevOps assessment and strategic planning.

Here is how we helped our clients leverage DevOps

Grindr

One of the world’s largest social apps, Grindr relies on Systango for its DevOps and QA expertise. They wanted to create a platform that was more than just a means to chat and meet, but a place for a passionate and progressive lifestyle. They needed to work on their performance and Quality Assurance, that’s when they thought of approaching Systango to help them with their pain points.

Our contribution: 

• Our team built & improved app functionalities and UX.
• We were involved in rewriting the chat integration system.
• We worked on chat screens that use MongooseIM.
• We performed end to end testing of their app on both the iOS and Android platforms to ensure clients objectives were met.

Waitlist

Waitlist came to us for technical expertise, to build a full version SAAS Queue-Management Web App from an MVP and redo their iOS and Android app.

Our contribution:

Ever since Waitlist has come to us in 2012, we are managing its web platform, Google Cloud environment, iOS app and external integrations.

The relationship has now grown beyond a vendor-client and we are now very tightly integrated with Waitlist core values.

Systango (DevOps consultancy, London), helps you align with your organizational goals, producing high-quality software and apps. Connect with our DevOps engineer today to stay a step ahead technologically.

Keep learning:

• DevOps Brings 100% Customer Satisfaction – Here’s How?
• Explore the 7 DevOps principles that business must embrace.
• Hiring a DevOps Engineer? Here is all you need to know.
• Determine why DevOps is an in-demand transition in 5 Reasons to Adopt DevOps.
• Planning to implement DevOps? Learn which are the 5 Essential tools.