How Hiscox Reduced Cost Per Release by 97% with Puppet-Powered DevOps
Hiscox is an insurance provider specializing in property and casualty insurance for companies and individuals. The organization’s server fleet — including thousands of virtual machines — supports development of insurance products, customer-facing web portals, internal business apps, and more. Hiscox’s siloed teams, proprietary tools, and “very little empathy” between the IT and business functions led them to search for an automation and configuration management tool to build a smooth DevOps initiative.
Benefits of Using Puppet:
Reduced cost per software code release by 97%
by reducing time by 89% and staff required by 75%
Increased deployments to 50x/week,
up from 10 weeks for a single release
Doubled virtual machine build speed
with consistent infrastructure management
Challenge: Inefficient Processes & Lack of Shared Vision
“The journey of DevOps adoption at Hiscox was inspired by a need to increase the pace of change,” said Jonathan Fletcher, Enterprise Architect and DevOps & Platform Technology Lead at Hiscox. “The business is growing fast, the market changes rapidly and it’s important as an IT function that we can respond to those demands. It really is a journey; there are wrong turns, ups and downs, and while we’ve made real progress, we still have a way to go. We have to work smarter, not just harder.”
“DevOps shouldn’t be ‘dev’ and ‘ops.’ Making change fast, at high quality and in line with business goals is everyone’s responsibility, so it should be called ‘DevOpsBizTestThingy.’”
- Jonathan Fletcher, Enterprise Architect and DevOps Platform Technology Lead at Hiscox
Hiscox wanted to blur the lines between ‘what’s good for IT’ and ‘what’s good for the business’. Fletcher characterized their desired end state as a symbiotic relationship: “IT should understand where the business wants to go and have a very close understanding of how the business works,” he said. The business, in turn, “should have empathy for the challenges of IT delivery and work with us to mitigate them.”
Those challenges included:
- Slow pace of change
- Silos
- Competing priorities
- Heavy workloads
- Conflicting goals
- Expensive, repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks
- Wasteful processes
- “Very little empathy” between teams
With organization-wide issues stemming from the fact that the teams responsible for creating and operating IT were constantly on different pages — “we had development teams that threw code over the wall to the release team that deployed it, and then a separate team supported the code once it went to production” — Hiscox was a prime DevOps candidate.
The Hiscox team sought out Puppet Enterprise for automation and configuration management — two key practices whereDevOps initiative lives or dies. Basically, Fletcher said, the goal was to “define as much as possible” using Puppet
Results: Fast Changes, Preconfigured Middleware & Consistent System State
“I’d love to configure everything with Puppet and define the entire infrastructure with Puppet.”
- Jonathan Fletcher, Enterprise Architect and DevOps & Platform Technology Lead, Hiscox
By streamlining tools, aligning responsibilities, and collaborating across stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), the company was able to start tearing down the silos that had kept their IT and business goals separate.
Automating tasks, testing, and virtual machine (VM) builds got the Hiscox IT team part of the way there. Automating testing (with a combination of tools including TeamCity and Jenkins) reduced an effort that used to take multiple days to what Fletcher called “an overnight, hands-free process.” Automating VM provisioning with VMware cut their build time in half, and aggregating metrics with Splunk gives the team visibility into relationships and dependencies between components.
Puppet Enterprise helped Fletcher’s team take their DevOps further, automating middleware configurations across platforms (such as ensuring security software is installed on every machine). Spinning up VMs now takes minutes, not hours — and maintaining system state across the 2,500-VM fleet is now an automatic task handled by Puppet. “For us, Puppet is about converging state and about stability and alignment, keeping us maintained at a certain level,” said Fletcher.
The improved efficiency, visibility, and reliability of their infrastructure — enabled by a host of DevOps tools and ensured by Puppet Enterprise — gives Hiscox’s IT teams shared direction and a unified vision for the best version of their SDLC. “DevOps is a journey, not a destination,” said Fletcher — and Puppet Enterprise is there to support that journey every step of the way.
Accelerate your pace of development without compromising secure IT operations by requesting a live demo of Puppet Enterprise with a member of the team.