The Business Value of PaaS Automation

eZ Systems Conference, 6th June 2017

Kieron Sambrook-Smith, Chief Commercial Officer, Platform.sh

Email: Kieron.Sambrook-smith@platform.sh

Phone: +44(0)7818 427136

Skype: KieronSS

Our background and how we arrived at the PaaSWho are we ?

What

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud based hosting - “Hi Control aPaaS”

NoOps + cloning means Continuous Delivery

High Availability - All the time

Improvements & ROI are breathtaking (cost reduction, productivity &

performance)

Why

Drupal Commerce deployed across 100,000 sites

300 projects delivered

All had the same web based project delivery problems

What do we do and why ?

Customers & Partners

350 enterprise clients running live services in our dedicated triple redundant 99.99% offering

85% are eCommerce

350 enterprise clients and 2,000 self-service clients running projects on our LXC container based service

11 regions around the globe on AWS, Azure and Orange Business Services

OEM Cloud contracts

Java CMS….

Subscriptions from

$10 to $100k per month

Global 24/7/365 support

(Stack support & Drupal Application support)

Customers in 116+ countries

Comprehensive Offering Since Q3 2014

Pricing & support coverage

Process improvement & accelerationWhat is automation ?

Three Types of Work

Business process point of view

Planned work, Changes & Unplanned work

We want to reduce Unplanned work, and makes other work quick & repeatable

Development Operations Live Service

Agile development

Testing

UAT

Systems & environments

Servers & hosting

Security of data

Marketing

Services

eCommerce sales

Support

PLANNED WORK

CHANGES

UNPLANNED WORK

Process improvement – we’ve been here before !

• Lean, Kaizen, Continuous Improvement and Just-in-Time were regime changing principles in the 1970’s.

• Back then, technology was a side-show. Nowadays it’s the only show.

• IT is at the heart of what we do. Improving processes between the developer and live – DevOps - is highly valuable.

• There are many supporting technologies that strive to improve processes in this space.

• We concentrate on the difficult block of DevOps processes that map applications to infrastructure.

All work is a process

So lets look at how it all fits together as a system, and make it all work better.

All the processes that exist between the developer and the live system - development to operations,

or DevOps - are significant to the customer experience.

Therefore better DevOps impacts the live service in many positive ways = competitive advantage.

“DevOps are defined as a set of principles and process management practices that aim to

make software building, testing & release management fast and reliable”

Operations value

Automating the entire DevOps process block…..

Development Operations Live Service

And the difference between the High Performers and Low Performers is huge !

Strong relationship between good DevOps and competitive edge

2016 State of DevOps Report – research from 3,200 professionals to see what level of DevOps they had implemented

46x 440x

96x5x

ROI of Better DevOps

Much more efficient throughput + much shorter elapsed times = regime change !

Efficiencies streamline business process and collapses time to deliver

Support

440 x faster featureconcept to live

46 x more code deployments

22% less unplanned work50% less time remediating security issues

5x less faileddeployments

96x faster MTTR = less time application down

Development Operations Live Service

• Many different productivity tools, provided by hosting infrastructure vendors (IaaS) and independents

• Difficult to tie them all together and track the

constantly changing environment

• Doing DevOps well is important, but doing it yourself

is like building a house on shifting sands

Automation - Doing it yourself ?

….is difficult, expensive and a long term commitment.

Critical aspects of automation that are rarely included within scripts

The process of logging in and executing a series of commands in a compliant manner involves:

Doing this for hundreds of scripts, plus long term maintenance, key individuals moving on not having properly

documented it all, AND the constantly changing environment are the usual factors for things continually going wrong.

The problem with DevOps regimes that “pretend” to automate already

Often times it’s all smoke and mirrors.

1. Authentication and authorisation.2. Knowledge of passwords.3. Automatic backup & change management.4. Command syntax knowledge specific to the stack, hardware, toolset versions etc.5. Parameter validation and logic to handle errors and conditions.6. Logging and audit.

Their Use Case isn’t just your Use Case, it’s everybody else’s Use Case

They probably know a lot more about this set of problems than you do.

Remember, we originally launched our PaaS to solve the problems we kept seeing on those 350 projects.

We have all seen a lot more since then, in a lot more detail, and we’re solving them all (mostly).

And we’re supporting all the versions of all the stack components and services you’re interested in.

Buy automation from the experts

It’s better for everybody in the long run

The difference between Managed Hosting & a PaaS

Application lifecycle management

Automation & consistency that just allows code to run

Clone live running services & web-sites in seconds

Good for production, great for development

Repeatability inspires confidence to change everything

High availability (HA) & performance

Containers and triple redundancy

Stack is engineered for performance and highly suited to mission critical

Throw any priority of change into production and not worry about bugs or performance degradation

We let code run

“Develop, Deploy, Rinse and Repeat”, Damien Tournaud, CTO Platform.sh

1. Fast onboarding for developers, contractors & 3rd parties

2. Developing & test every feature in a copy of live – for PHP, Drupal, Symfony, Ruby, Python, Node.js…Java

3. See how it deploys, and then how it works

4. Automated testing in the background

5. No more tickets and no more waiting to get things, or to change things

Development workflow

It’s everything we’ve ever wanted. We just didn’t know it until now…..

Development Operations Live Service

Support

Data Driven Hosting Decisions - Metrics

Platform.sh automates a big complicated block of DevOps processes - so you don’t have to!

10 metrics we collect from established Case Study customers

ROI of Platform.sh

The automation of DevOps processes has enabled much better development workflow

Efficiencies streamline business process and collapses time to deliver

Does this slide reflect Platform.sh benefits on top of better DevOps ?

Development Operations Live Service

Support

20-40% moreproductivity

20% quicker

NoOps = 100% productivitygain

90% less tickets = less waiting

Fewer bad deployments, quicker TTFB

Fewer outages & better performance

“I’d say overall developer productivity has improved about 20% ”

“We’re now saving the time and effort of 4-5 full-time technical staff (£300,000 p.a.) to do what the developer can do now at the touch of a button.”

“Code review, functional approval and UAT between the 10 strong distributed team, design agency and management improved dramatically overnight”

“The entire UAT problem has gone away now, I’d say the whole process is about 7 times faster.”

“We issue 80% fewer tickets than we used to, and most of those are knowledge sharing opposed to issues.”

“Our deployment cycle used to be twice a month, and only during low traffic. We now release daily, whatever the site is doing!”

“Coding accuracy and design velocity improved by over 20%. Downtime has been virtually eliminated…..”

What customers say

Reiss, TES Global, Studio Aqua

“Perfect consistency between environments allows us to deploy to live at any-time without worrying about errors, I don’t think we’ve ever had an issue with the production service.”

“We don’t need DevOps anymore, nor do we have to wait hours or days for the vendor to respond to our tickets”

“Tickets in QA have disappeared”

“We no longer pay for massive permanent resource allocations to meet unknown future peak traffic, because we know we can rely on a robust stack which scales seamlessly in minutes when needed.”

“Platform.sh scaled us up and performance was great right through the peak 5,000 concurrent users.”

“We upsized to a PE96 during the summer sale and performance was phenomenal. The old architecture needed way more hardware during this period and it still used to fall over”

What customers say

British Council, Canadian Football League (CFL), Reiss

Thank-you.

Email: Kieron.Sambrook-smith@platform.sh

Phone: +44(0)7818 427136

Skype: KieronSS