Client story Application Transformation: Leading Retailer Drives Faster App Delivery With Platform Engineering

Facts at a glance

Client industry

Retail

Challenge

Improve delivery, management and security across isolated app platforms.

Solution

Modern platform buildout leveraging cloud DevOps to manage secrets, app deployment and CI/CD pipelines using GKE, and HashiCorp Terraform and Vault

Insight provided:

• Consulting Services
• Advisory and strategic services for Platform as a Service (PaaS) implementation
• Modern applications expertise
• Cloud DevOps platforms

Outcomes:

• Modern platform supporting e-commerce arm — generating billions in sales
• 48 GC projects spanning 3,600 applications & 24 business units
• Hundreds of teams empowered with improved app delivery & self-service
• Successful app migration from on-premises to GC (through strategic platform enablement work)
• Centralized, consistent secret access to make auditability & traceability easier
• Newfound ability to standardize certificates across the org (leveraging HashiCorp Vault Certificate Engine)
• Faster, more seamless app delivery & migration at scale

Download the client story

The vision: High-performing application teams delivering faster across the business

For this retail giant, each of its developer teams had its own isolated platform, posing challenges with visibility and security across its development environments. With hundreds of teams, the client needed a way to provide each with a personalized, secure development platform. Additionally, the retailer’s existing system lacked standardization, making it challenging to deploy new applications and manage existing infrastructure.

“As one of the largest home improvement retailers in the world, this client's modern platform supports everything from its billion-dollar e-commerce arm to business-critical apps spanning accounting, finance, customer management and more.”

To overcome these challenges, the client needed to build a more streamlined development environment and platform — one that could allow teams to spin up on demand. Each entity had its own standards and set of practices that needed to be accommodated — and this was where Insight’s strategic expertise in cloud and modern platforms came in.

Strategic implementation

Insight went to work on a developer platform automation initiative that could support hundreds of teams and provide the client with a secure, standardized platform to deploy applications. To accomplish this, our teams leveraged HashiCorp^® Terraform^® to manage infrastructure provisioning and HashiCorp Vault^™ to improve teams’ security posture across all environments. We worked to create a new set of policies for the retailer, leaning on our deep expertise within GKE.

To provide each team with a personalized experience, Insight created developer platforms that could be customized to fit the unique requirements for each. This allowed all third parties to implement its own requirements within its platform/area, while still having access to the tools needed to deploy its software and applications.

The scale of the program was considerable — totaling 48 GC projects spanning 3,600 apps and 24 business units.

A strategic platform engineering approach

The outcome: A platform to streamline work, secure the business and drive modernization across the app ecosystem

Today, the client is able to centralize and standardize its secret access, making it more auditable and traceable. It’s also gained the ability to standardize how it issues certificates across the organization, leveraging the HashiCorp Vault PKI Secrets Engine. By onboarding its applications to GC more securely and quickly, the client was able to accelerate a seamless migration of 3,600 apps from on-premises to GC.

Thanks to Insight's work, the client now has a self-service platform buildout that allows it to migrate and rebuild its applications more quickly, efficiently and at scale. This has not only improved its security posture across its application environments and customers — but it also positions the organization to save time and money for years to come.

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