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Company AppDirect Location San Francisco, California Industry Software

Challenge

Solution

"My idea was: Let's create an environment where teams can deploy their services faster, and they will say, 'Okay, I don't want to build in the monolith anymore. I want to build a service,'" says Lacerte. They considered and prototyped several different technologies before deciding to adopt

Impact

The Kubernetes platform has helped support the engineering team's 10x growth over the past few years. Coupled with the fact that they were continually adding new features, Lacerte says, "I think our velocity would have slowed down a lot if we didn't have this new infrastructure." Moving to Kubernetes and services has meant that deployments have become much faster due to less dependency on custom-made, brittle shell scripts with SCP commands. Time to deploy a new version has shrunk from 4 hours to a few minutes. Additionally, the company invested a lot of effort to make things self-service for developers. "Onboarding a new service doesn't require

With its end-to-end commerce platform for cloud-based products and services,

When Director of Software Development Pierre-Alexandre Lacerte started working there in 2014, the company had a monolith application deployed on a "tomcat infrastructure, and the whole release process was complex for what it should be," he says. "There were a lot of manual steps involved, with one engineer building a feature then creating a pull request, and a QA or another engineer validating the feature. Then it gets merged and someone else will take care of the deployment. So we had bottlenecks in the pipeline to ship a feature to production."

At the same time, the engineering team of 40 was growing, and the company wanted to add an increasing number of features to its products. As a member of the platform team, Lacerte began hearing from multiple teams that wanted to deploy applications using different frameworks and languages, from

From the beginning, Lacerte says, "My idea was: Let's create an environment where teams can deploy their services faster, and they will say, 'Okay, I don't want to build in the monolith anymore. I want to build a service.'" (Lacerte left the company in 2019.)

Working with the operations team, Lacerte's group got more control and access to the company's

They spun up the first few services on Kubernetes using

Today, though the monolith still exists, there are fewer and fewer commits and features. All teams are deploying on the new infrastructure, and services are the norm. AppDirect now has more than 50 microservices in production and 15 Kubernetes clusters deployed on AWS and on premise around the world.

Lacerte's strategy ultimately worked because of the very real impact the Kubernetes platform has had to deployment time. Due to less dependency on custom-made, brittle shell scripts with SCP commands, time to deploy a new version has shrunk from 4 hours to a few minutes. Additionally, the company invested a lot of effort to make things self-service for developers. "Onboarding a new service doesn't require

Additionally, the Kubernetes platform has helped support the engineering team's 10x growth over the past few years. "Ownership, a core value of AppDirect, reflects in our ability to ship services independently of our monolith code base," says Staff Software Developer Alexandre Gervais, who worked with Lacerte on the initiative. "Small teams now own critical parts of our business domain model, and they operate in their decoupled domain of expertise, with limited knowledge of the entire codebase. This reduces and isolates some of the complexity." Coupled with the fact that they were continually adding new features, Lacerte says, "I think our velocity would have slowed down a lot if we didn't have this new infrastructure."

The company also achieved cost savings by moving its marketplace and billing monoliths to Kubernetes from legacy EC2 hosts as well as by leveraging autoscaling, as traffic is higher during business hours.

AppDirect's cloud native stack also includes

That of course also means more responsibility. "We asked engineers to expand their horizons," says Gervais. "We moved from a culture limited to 'pushing code in a branch' to exciting new responsibilities outside of the code base: deployment of features and configurations; monitoring of application and business metrics; and on-call support in case of outages. It was an immense engineering culture shift, but the benefits are undeniable in terms of scale and speed."

As the engineering ranks continue to grow, the platform team has a new challenge, of making sure that the Kubernetes platform is accessible and easily utilized by everyone. "How can we make sure that when we add more people to our team that they are efficient, productive, and know how to ramp up on the platform?" Lacerte says. So we have the evangelists, the documentation, some project examples. We do demos, we have AMA sessions. We're trying different strategies to get everyone's attention."

Three and a half years into their Kubernetes journey, Gervais feels AppDirect "made the right decisions at the right time," he says. "Kubernetes and the cloud native technologies are now seen as the de facto ecosystem. We know where to focus our efforts in order to tackle the new wave of challenges we face as we scale out. The community is so active and vibrant, which is a great complement to our awesome internal team. Going forward, our focus will really be geared towards benefiting from the ecosystem by providing added business value in our day-to-day operations."