Case Study: Transforming A Global Retail Company: A Journey To Automated Software Delivery With CI/CD

The Challenge

With International expansion and constant UK growth, Arcadia are evolving at a phenomenal rate and were in the middle of a large transformation programme adopting Agile and DevOps as core principals to enable them deliver world class technology experiences.

To achieve these big ambitions, it was recognised that a strategic refresh of technology platforms was required. What was needed was a platform that would support significantly faster and more frequent release of software, enable shorter time to market and allow for fast, iterative, incremental software delivery. The requirement, of course, was to achieve this whilst keeping the existing high traffic platforms stable and available in order to protect the brand.

The Solution

AltoStack were engaged by Arcadia to;

• Own and operate the production AWS infrastructure, ensuring that they are always one step ahead of any potential problems via exploiting real-time telemetry.
• Own and operate the delivery pipeline, ensuring we are always pushing forward with our CI/CD transformation.
• Assist the software engineers and software engineers in test with automating their eco-system.

The Business Outcome

AltoStack continue to support Arcadia in their technology transformation – from a technology delivery and organisational and cultural change perspective. The main achievements secured for the client so far are as follows:

• Where before releases were on a monthly basis, new software is now shipped into production daily through effective use of Continuous Delivery and test and release automation
• Previously there was a great deal of risk around releases, now they are safe and low impact due to the effective use of the MicroService architecture and best-practice deployment pipelines.