DevOps Summit: How City Index reduced development cycles by 75 per cent

Database bottlenecks in testing undermined DevOps shift at City Index

Spread betting firm City Index claims that it achieved a 75 per cent reduction in its development cycles, contributing to a 20 per cent increase in output, as a result of implementing DevOps processes alongside a data virtualisation platform.

"City Index had already gone quite far down the agile process, but found that they had a bottleneck in testing. So they were restricted by their shared environments and only able to deliver updates and refresh their systems every eight hours or so," says Jes Breslaw, director of strategy EMEA at data virtualisation company Delphix.

Breslaw, who was speaking at DevOps 2015 in London today, continued: "They have eight engineers, but it was taking them eight hours to refresh their environment, so their ability to continually deliver to the organisation was restricted and, furthermore, their whole business was moving to mobile.

"They were spending more and more time 'keeping the lights on' and less time innovating. Their main way of interacting with customers was shifting to mobile, which is an incredibly competitive space - it takes just five or ten minutes to shift to a competitor so unless you're continually offering new features and a great experience they're going to go away. So they were under pressure to increase innovation to stay ahead of the competition.

"Agile had got them half of the way there, but testing restrictions were stopping them from making the full leap to continuous delivery," says Breslaw. "There wasn't anything out there that could help. They are an SQL house. They were able to clone databases, but they weren't able to provision them quick enough in order to meet their time and speed objectives," says Breslaw.

The approach the company took to removing the database bottleneck was data virtualisation, using tools demonstrated in a three-month proof of concept. Once that was done, "they rolled it out pretty quickly", says Breslaw. "With Delphix, it takes a couple of hours to install and you're spinning up virtual environments within 24 hours."

Breslaw added: "Delphix supports multiple data types - IBM DB2, Oracle, SAP, SQL Server and so on - and where companies really find the benefit is when they have multiple different types of data sources. Things like integration testing under DevOps, continuous integration, trying to synchronise multiple different data sources is almost impossible. With data as a service you can almost do that on-demand," says Breslaw.

With the bottle neck broken, City Index was able to drastically improve its responsiveness, reducing development cycles by 75 per cent, and increased the number of applications they were able to deliver by one-fifth.

But it didn't mean fewer people in operations, says Breslaw. Instead, it freed them up to do more complex, higher value work. "It meant that the database administrators, instead of doing mundane copying of data, are now doing performance tuning and regression testing."