Accenture Gains 10,000 Engineering Days per Year Through Continuous Delivery & ADOP

Summary: Accenture DevOps Platform (ADOP), a cloud-based continuous delivery platform, standardizes the implementation of tooling for continuous integration and continuous delivery practices as a managed service for its clients; saving time and enabling rapid innovation, sharing and reuse.

Challenge: Remove the barriers to continuous integration and continuous delivery and empower 1,000+ developers working on 100+ client projects

Solution: Create a version of ADOP with CloudBees CI and offer it in a Software as a Service model to clients

Results:

• 10,000 engineering days gained annually for innovation

• 80+% time reduction in Jenkins maintenance across the platform

• DevOps tool provisioning reduced from weeks to minutes

Product: CloudBees CI

All too often, companies have found that driving rapid, continuous software innovation is hampered by misalignment between development and operations, human errors in manual release procedures and too much time spent building, testing and releasing applications. Innovation and competitiveness often suffer at the hands of time and existing processes.

With these common challenges in mind, Accenture developed a better way to rapidly develop and deploy innovative software applications for its clients: The Accenture DevOps Platform (ADOP).

ADOP, a cloud-based continuous delivery tooling platform, is designed to simplify the implementation of continuous integration and continuous delivery practices, reduce the cost of DevOps infrastructure and increase the speed of adoption.

"Accenture expects to save nearly 10,000 engineering days per year offering ADOP, with CloudBees CI as a core component, enabling an 80% reduction in Jenkins maintenance across the platform,” says Mark Rendell, former global DevOps engineering lead at Accenture.

With offices and operations in more than 200 cities across 55 countries, Accenture develops and implements technology solutions for a client list that includes 94 of the Fortune Global 100 and more than 75 percent of the Fortune Global 500. In working with these clients, Accenture recognized a business-critical requirement shared by many of them: the need to continuously and rapidly roll out innovative software applications to increase competitiveness and advance business objectives.

Accenture needed a cloud-native architecture to quickly and easily set up an unlimited number of tooling environments for clients, using a standardized platform that isolated each project for security purposes. Accenture also wanted to give teams more development autonomy with a self-service model for spinning up controllers and new projects.

At the same time, the team had to prioritize stability, minimize the risk of outages and keep costs low for their clients. "We wanted a solution that was highly available and would scale with us,” says Andi Strain, Accenture’s DevOps platform lead.

By adding CloudBees CI, the Accenture team extended ADOP, their cloud-based continuous delivery tooling platform that enables DevOps practices by standardizing and streamlining processes internally and for clients. ADOP helps Accenture teams and clients build, test and release application and infrastructure code faster via automated continuous delivery pipelines.

"ADOP incorporates CloudBees CI, enabling the ability to scale Jenkins and the rest of our tools to a much larger user base, and, ultimately, help serve our internal teams and our clients more effectively,” Strain adds.

Among the first and biggest changes undertaken with CloudBees CI was assigning controllers to individual projects, instead of using shared controllers for multiple projects. This change gave teams the freedom to add plugins or jobs without affecting the work of other teams, with the added benefit of isolation between projects.

"With CloudBees CI added to ADOP, Jenkins maintenance for projects using the platform can be as low as 11 hours annually. That’s more than a 90% saving in time and cost,” says Rendell.

"Many of our clients are looking to start with DevOps, but don’t have an engineer available to support the toolchain,” says Luis Souza, a DevOps team lead at Accenture. "With ADOP, a team of engineers focus on the platform, allowing delivery teams to focus on innovation.”

"ADOP, enabled by CloudBees CI, supports self service, in which teams can achieve what they need to do themselves. That’s a very powerful capability,” says Strain.

One innovative aspect of ADOP is the concept of cartridges, allowing teams to reuse packages of Accenture’s DevOps delivery assets. For example, when a team works on a Salesforce project, they will load the Salesforce cartridge to build continuous delivery pipelines for that technology.

"That supports our ‘just-add-code’ philosophy for ADOP,” says Strain. Cartridges are available for almost 100 technologies including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Blockchain, artificial intelligence, serverless, and infrastructure code like Terraform and Ansible. In addition, the cartridges promote re-use of Accenture’s innovations in testing and DevSecOps.

Currently, about 1,000 Accenture developers are using ADOP for more than 100 different projects, an amount expected to at least double within the next year.

One such project involved building extremely complex environments requiring an Oracle retail application stack for a major retailer.

Before ADOP, the client’s environment provisioning took more than a week, burdening development teams and creating a significant delivery bottleneck. Now, teams use the Terraform and Ansible cartridges to develop and test infrastructure code to fully automate environment provisioning, installation and configuration.

Accenture reduced the time required for infrastructure provisioning from more than one week to just minutes. In addition, the team reduced the time required for environment installation and configuration by 98%; from two months to one day. "ADOP with CloudBees CI enables us to focus more time on delivering value for our clients,” says Souza.

“Accenture expects to save nearly 10,000 engineering days per year offering ADOP, with CloudBees CI as a core component,” says Rendell.

"Jenkins maintenance for projects using the platform can be as low as 11 hours annually. That’s more than a 90% savings in time and cost,” says Rendell.

"With ADOP, Accenture reduced the time required for infrastructure provisioning from more than one week to just minutes. In addition, the team reduced the time required for environment installation and configuration by 98%; from two months to one day,” says Souza.