A milestone in our continous delivery journey

A little over a year ago, the Engineering team at Independer was at a curious cross roads. We had grown rapidly over the last few years from 3 to 6+ scrum teams while keeping the same monolithic architecture alive. We were releasing twice a week to production but they were massive all-at-once releases where we deployed to production and mostly prayed that things would land auto-magically. Teams were waiting on each other and one team could potentially hold up the entire release train.

We were striving to come up with a solution which would enable the product teams to be more agile, have more control over when they release their feature and increase the rate of innovation and value addition to our users. We decided that the best way to do this was to break the monolith into scrum team sized chunks enabling teams to become completely autonomous, where teams could control not only their releases but also reduce the cognitive overload of how much they needed to keep in mind while making a release. They could attain mastery over their product and domain without worrying about the entire enterprise landscape.

Yesterday marked an awesome milestone in our journey towards team autonomy and continuous delivery. After almost 9 months of brainstorming, lots of enthusiasm and learning, we went live with our first product to be completely autonomous from the rest of the platform. Our ‘Energie’ product is now decoupled from our monolithic platform and delivered through separate pipelines to production.

A few noteworthy points:

• Pushed 3 times to production since we went live while the rest of the teams release twice a week
• Average build time for the back-end : 10 minutes
• Average build time for front-end, including running E2E tests: 25 Minutes
• Build and deploy to Master, Test and UAT — automatic
• Promote to production — guarded by a manual approval step which is more psychological than anything else and the team intends to remove.
• All pipelines in YAML making it easy to review and maintain

It’s amazing how frictionless the journey is for the developers to deliver from code to production. Big kudos to the team and we hope to be able to deliver the same frictionless journey to production for all our key products very soon.

A year ago, the team was grappling with how to face this humungous task before them. As the proverb goes, ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.’

Happy to say we have well and truly taken not only a bite, but also digested it and converted it to energy. Onwards to the next!