DevOps Summit: DevOps tips the balance in favour of in-house development

Euromoney, British Gas and Ovo Energy adopt DevOps methodologies to speed up development cycles and reduce failed releases

Organisations as diverse as publisher Euromoney and British Gas have explained why they adopted DevOps methodologies at Computing's DevOps 2015 Summit this week.

In the process, they have been able to speed up their development cycles, produce more releases and also reduce the risk of failed releases.

"At Euromoney, we started our DevOps initiative about a year ago," said Philip Wigg, DevOps team lead at Euromoney Institutional Investor. "Some of the problems we were having included failed releases and taking a long time to release. We had services that were like 'snowflakes', so we couldn't rebuild them from scratch."

He continued: "Now, we have adopted configuration management and we have a continuous working pipeline. So we are doing much better than we were just a year ago."

While Euromoney was founded in 1969 and therefore has a significant legacy IT infrastructure that may need turning around, Ovo Energy, in contrast, is a relative start-up.

"We actually started with a fresh platform. So we have been using DevOps from the start," said Iain McInnes, lead DevOps specialist at Ovo Energy. "All the infrastructure was driven by DevOps and we have got quite a stable DevOps pipeline. We are not quite there with full delivery and production though, but we are hoping to get to that point soon."

British Gas, meanwhile, is almost the opposite of Ovo - a long-established energy company, which has a well-established legacy IT infrastructure, much of it based around SAP, but Connected Homes was started as a standalone organisation.

For the organisation, DevOps has tipped the balance in favour of in-house control compared to outsourcing.

"We started with the DevOps approach, but very much in a piecemeal way," said Jay Harrison, development operations engineer at British Gas Connected Homes. Initially, much of its IT was outsourced, "but we have gradually been regaining the internal control over our products and platforms over the last 18 months to two years".

Harrison added: "We are now in a better place with product-centric teams, with integrated tests, dev and operations, as well as product and project management functions. So we are well on the way to a full DevOps environment."

Also appearing on the same panel at DevOps 2015 was Boyan Dimitrov, platform automation lead at popular taxi-app maker Hailo, who also gave a presentation on how DevOps flexibility lets Hailo manage peak time and tube strike pressures.