Linedata Achieves Global Continuous Delivery with Harness

About Linedata

Linedata’s 1,300 employees in 20 offices provide global humanized technology solutions and services for the asset management and credit industries. Headquartered in France, Linedata had revenues of EUR 179.0 million in 2017. Software delivery within Linedata’s Asset Management AMP platform covers 4 business teams with around 50 developers/QA engineers in 5 geolocations around the world.

Next-Gen Asset Mgmt Thru Microservices

Linedata is transforming into a modular, next-generation asset management platform (AMP) based on .NET core microservices running in the public cloud. As part of this transformation, an internal Continuous Delivery (CD) initiative was created to increase developer velocity, strengthen feedback loops between dev and QA, and reduce time-to-market.

Deployment Scripts Didn’t Scale

In the past, deployments were performed by QA engineers manually, using Terraform, and custom bash scripts. A typical deployment would take up to 1 hour per environment. In addition, deployment verification took 3-4 QA engineers a further 2 hours (min) with manual handoffs/approvals around the world as release candidates were promoted across each environment.
This manual deployment process meant feedback loops between developers and QA engineers could take days, given the geolocation and time zone differences between teams.

Moving to a microservices architecture in the public cloud meant that Linedata’s current deployment process wouldn’t scale. Engineering and QA needed a new approach to Continuous Delivery, a self-service CD initiative was born.

Empowering Teams with Self-Service CD

“We wanted to empower our Engineering and Business teams with self-service Continuous Delivery,” said Andrey Budzar, Director of DevOps at Linedata.

“Strengthening the feedback loop between Engineering and the Business would provide our customers with maximum value,” said Andrey.

Linedata’s vision was to trigger and automate deployment pipelines from their Continuous Integration (CI) tool TeamCity. Developers could use CI webhooks to initiate an automated pipeline that would promote, test and verify new builds across their dev, QA, staging and production environments.

We wanted to empower our Engineering and Business teams with self-service - Andrey Budzar | Director DevOps | Linedata

Harness Continuous Delivery as-a-Service

Within a few weeks of implementing Harness, Andrey and his team had successfully rolled out a new self-service CD platform for development, QA, and the business. “We realized tangible benefit within weeks of implementation,” said Andrey.

Today, Linedata has automated deployment pipelines across all their environments, with automated environment provisioning, and automated verification to test new builds and release candidates. Harness is now successfully integrated across Linedata’s technology stack of:

• Docker for .NET core microservices & .NET 4.X
• Amazon Web Services – EC2, ECS, and Fargate
• Teamcity for CI
• Atlassian Jira for pipeline ticketing & approvals
• Resharper, xUnit, WhiteHat, Selenium and LoadRunner for automated testing

We realized tangible benefit within weeks of implementation - Andrey Budzar | Director DevOps | Linedata

$500,000 Savings in DevOps Costs

With Harness, Linedata eliminated the need to incur $500,000 in DevOps costs by scaling Continuous Delivery manually thru scripts and a team of DevOps engineers. Engineering, Business, and Ops teams across 5 geolocations are now empowered with self-service Continuous Delivery, maximizing collaboration and providing exceptional business value.

Linedata has also seen deployment times drop by 80% with verification/testing times drop by as much as 88%.

The net result is faster feedback loops for dev and the business, a reduced time-to-market, and better product experience for Linedata’s customers.