Continuous Delivery (CD) is emerging as the foundation for agile IT practices. Raley’s embarked on a journey to develop a powerful CD infrastructure to support its new digital initiatives, starting from a migration from a custom eCommerce system. Grid Dynamics was engaged as the strategic partner to build the new eCommerce experience across all form factors and implement a state of the art CD foundation. Qubell was chosen as an enterprise DevOps platform to enable self-service dynamic environment provisioning and continuous deployment. Implementing Continuous Delivery enabled faster time to market, increased quality of customer experience, and improved consistency and reliability of software. Value realization from Continuous Delivery began after the first month Grid Dynamics became engaged.

C A S E S T U D Y S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4

Replatforming to SAP hybris: Faster Time to Market Through Environment Automation and Continuous DeliveryMigration from homegrown eGrocery system to SAP hybris accomplished with higher ROI by adopting Continuous Delivery

RALEY’S SUCCESSFULLY REPLATFORMS IN UNDER 12 MONTHS • SEPTEMBER 2014 GRID DYNAMICS/QUBELL CASE STUDY

the business challenge: rapid time to market for new, agile commerce solution to drive online business results

As grocery business continues to be disrupted by the digital and onmichannel services, Raley’s grocery chain needed a powerful next-generation eCommerce platform to deliver an array of exciting digital services and provide a consistent user experience across all channels. Raley’s key priorities included state of the art user experience across search, personalization, merchandising, loyalty, checkout, and fulfillment. Internally, integrated advanced controls were needed to transparently manage the online channel. Finally, the platform needed to be extensible and integration friendly.

Raley’s existing platform was unable to meet this business challenge. The platform had been built over a long period of time and was based on an obsolete technology stack with many custom applications. Development and release process had a number of limitations, preventing software changes from being released and deployed quickly enough to address the business demand.

Key risks and limitations of the legacy delivery process were:

• Static environments: Static environments were used for development, testing, and production. Thus, every configuration change to these environments had to be performed manually by a dedicated engineer. This slowed development and testing, added potential for error, and increased operational costs due to inefficient utilization of datacenter resources.

• Poor team scalability: The legacy process could efficiently support only a small development team. This limited how many updates Raley’s could make over a period of time.

• Personnel dependencies: Using dedicated engineers for manual tasks introduces the risk that, when an engineer is not be available, either through sickness or having left the company, the knowledge and skills are lost and release cycle is delayed.

• Inefficiency: Manual processes are labor-intensive and limited by the number of available personnel. This in turn limits the number of deployments that can be made.

• Long testing and release cycles: Full regression testing was taking place in the end of the release pipeline and took several days to find even simple configuration errors.

• Human error: Deployments required multiple manual operations as well as direct interactions with third parties (i.e., cloud provider). Each operation represented a potential point of failure that could lead to system downtime and loss of revenue.

solution: continuous delivery allows for fast, incremental, and continuous innovation

After analyzing new business strategy and the state or the current eCommerce system, Raley’s made a strategic decision to do full replatforming and engaged Grid Dynamics as an eCommerce platforms solutions provider. SAP hybris was chosen as an eCommerce platform for Raley’s based on their requirements. SAP hybris provided a full-featured, modern commercial platform that supports significant extensions, customizations, and integration with other custom and third-party digital services. This enabled Raley’s to create the next-generation, digital omnichannel Grocery platform it envisioned.

In addition to the functional aspect of the new platform, Raley’s had two major requirements:

1. Complete migration from the old platform within 12 months from start to go-live, while showing constant progress to the business stakeholders.

2. Continue implementing new capabilities incrementally and continuously in an efficient way once the new platform was live.

The challenge of rapid development, along with continuous integration and delivery, needed to be addressed to ensure maximum ROI was achieved with SAP hybris.

To be able to build and launch a new platform quickly, safely and cost-efficiently, Grid Dynamics implemented and adopted Continuous Delivery pipeline from the beginning of the project. Qubell enterprise automation platform was chosen to provide one-click dynamic environment provisioning, continuous deployment, and developer self-service.

The CD pipeline needed to support incremental development, automate testing, and enable continuous deployment. In order provide necessary capabilities, Grid Dynamics implemented and adopted proper delivery processes, standards and best practices, such as Agile project management, database and test data management, application properties management, functional and performance test automation.

RALEY’S SUCCESSFULLY REPLATFORMS IN UNDER 12 MONTHS • SEPTEMBER 2014 GRID DYNAMICS/QUBELL CASE STUDY

Processes and standards was supported and enforced by end-to-end Continuous Delivery infrastructure consisting of the following key components:

• Continuous Integration pipeline with Jenkins

• Continuous functional testing with Selenuim

• Continuous performance testing with Jagger

• Environment management portal enabling centralized and self-service environment provisioning with Qubell

• DevTest cloud with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

• Common catalog of versioned, certified components with Qubell

• Deployment automation with Chef

• Live production upgrades with Qubell

• Agile development methodology with bi-weekly sprints

• Matching by-weekly releases

An important technology choice was made to use a hybrid cloud. This enabled more flexibility, as static by design production site was hosted on a private cloud, while more dynamic dev/test environments could be allocated and deallocated on the public cloud on demand.

For the whole duration of the project, a joint Raley’s/

Grid Dynamics team consisting of managers, analysts, architects, developers, QAs, release engineers, and DevOps were working on the Grid Dynamics Continuous Delivery pipeline. It helps to unite the team and increase productivity by using proven process and tools to deliver the benefits of automation, integration, and CD to retailers. It streamlines software design to enable rapid delivery of code at low risk with minimal overhead. It can be run on premise or in the cloud, and as a managed service.

Grid Dynamics implemented CD based on dynamic environments for development and quality assurance. As described above, these environments are powered by Qubell, Chef, and Amazon VPC and utilize industry standard tools such as Jenkins, Nexus, and Jagger.

CD brings the reliability of an assembly line to the development process (see Figure 1). With CD, each stage of development is clearly defined and automated to minimize errors and delays. The pipeline framework eliminates the need for manual management of processes and orchestrates development, test, and support personnel to act as a single team. It also ensures that important project knowledge is integrated into processes rather than held by a few key individuals. The structure of the Continuous Delivery pipeline makes software delivery as repeatable and reliable as any manufacturing line.

Continuous Delivery also provided stakeholders with increased visibility into the program status. Traditionally

Figure 1: Agile Software Factory

asf: designed by grid dynamics, powered by qubell

development and QA team

Defects/Feedback loop

acceptance qarun automatic and manualuser acceptance tests

release manager

production

Foundation: standards & best practices, deployment automation, dynamic environments, environments and deployments management portal

Grid Dynamics Agile Software Factory Team:Implement Agile Software Factory, Manage and improve it, Provide 24x7x365 support

Dev Sandboxenvironment

QA/SITenvironment

Performanceenvironment

Staging/UATenvironment

Productionenvironment

Code/Tests

Code/Tests

• Implement code

• unit tests

• auto functional tests

• auto performance tests

Built & statically veri�ed package

Functionally veri�ed package

Performance veri�ed package

ReleaseCandidate package

ProductionDeployment

Deploy & run automatic functional tests

Build & unit testing

Deploy & run automatic performance tests

Deploy & run user acceptance tests

Deploy

RALEY’S SUCCESSFULLY REPLATFORMS IN UNDER 12 MONTHS • SEPTEMBER 2014 GRID DYNAMICS/QUBELL CASE STUDY

stakeholders wait months before they have enough information to evaluate the speed and quality of the implementation of their vision. If changes are required after months of work, it is expensive and more difficult to correct. With the CD pipeline in place, checkpoints are provided much earlier along with transparent metrics so stakeholders can proactively manage and mitigate risks as they arise.

results: measuring higher ROI

With early implementation and adoption of Continuous Delivery pipeline, the migration process to SAP hybris was accomplished more smoothly, in less time, and with fewer deployment issues. Grid Dynamics was able to show the first working versions of the new eCommerce platform after several months and complete the launch in less than 12 months. In addition, during the replatforming process, Raley’s realized ROI from implementing Continuous Delivery after the first month.

The direct savings were a result of ubiquitous automation and the savings have continued after the migration was completed. Automation of testing and release processes based on Grid Dynamics CD solution enabled Raley’s

to re-allocate 20% of the development team from manual work to implementing new changes. Raley’s has also realized significant value through accelerated development. For example, the average duration from feature completion to release candidate has dropped from 3 days to just 4 hours after implementing Continuous Delivery (see Table 1). Raley’s now sees an average of 25 deployments per day with an average duration of provisioning an environment and deployment of latest application version of less than 1 hour.

The impact on testing efficiency has been substantial, as well. Raley’s is now able to implement functional and performance testing at the same time as new features are added. As a result, the development team no longer needs to wait on the manual testing team to actually run tests and provide feedback. Elimination of manual testing bottlenecks significantly accelerated development and dramatically reduced the cost of fixing bugs. The development team can implement more changes and iterate faster than with their legacy system.

For example, with the first months of replatforming Grid Dynamics and Raley’s went from having no automated backend testing to implementing 1200 backend and 200 UI automated tests (see Table 2). Automated processes complete these comprehensive tests blocks in 3 and 2 hours respectively. Performance testing has been

Development Team Capability Before After CICDCommits and builds per day 3 15Deployments per day 1 25Average duration of deployment 4 hours 1 hourAverage duration from feature completion to release candidate 3 days 4 hours

Table 1: Development Team Capacity

After CICDNumber of backend automated tests

1200

Number of UI automated tests 200Average time to run backend tests

3 hours

Average time to run UI tests 2 hoursAverage time to run performance tests

1 hours

Number of performance metrics collected

>100

Table 2: QA Automation Efficiency

Factor SavingsCICD-based Pipeline (build, provision, deploy, test)

300 runs per month Manual overhead: 2.5 man/h/run Total savings: 750 man/h

Dev Sandbox On-Demand Provisioning

30 runs per month Manual overhead: 2man/h/run Total savings: 60 man/h

Automated Hybris Extensions Deploy to Static Environments

40 runs per month Manual overhead: 1.5 man/h/run Total savings: 60 man/h

Table 3: Quantifiable Savings

RALEY’S SUCCESSFULLY REPLATFORMS IN UNDER 12 MONTHS • SEPTEMBER 2014 GRID DYNAMICS/QUBELL CASE STUDY

automated as well, and Raley’s can now collect over 100 different real-time performance metrics that were previously not accessible.

These benefits are quantified in terms of hours saved (see Table 3). For example, automating the development, test, and release pipeline saves 750 man/hours per month.

An additional 120 hours savings arises from processes associated with on-demand provisioning and deployment to static environments. Note that these savings do not reflect the added benefit of intangible factors such as higher quality and faster time-to-market.

The use of dynamic environments plays a key role in Raley’s results. Dynamic environments eliminate many of the inefficiencies of static environments. Development and QA teams can bring up an environment when they need it and then release it once they are done with it.

In addition to cost saving, dynamic environments have further simplified the development pipeline. For example, since multiple developer sandboxes can be brought up simultaneously, there is no need to coordinate the sharing of limited resources. This has led to greater team efficiency. Raley’s can also scale teams as needed and has increased the throughput of features released over time.

Raley’s has significantly increased its business agility through faster delivery of functionality by extending CD to all steps of new environment creation and application deployment. The result is that Raley’s can deploy environments substantially faster and with less risk, saving both time and money. These savings also apply to static staging and production. Overall, deployment automation has reduced hands-on and manual processing, simplified environment management, and improved change control.

long-term benefits

Raley’s continues to realize ongoing benefits from implementing CICD:• Higher quality: When projects are under tight

deadlines, development teams may feel pressure to marginalize testing to meet deadlines. Similarly, the manual testing team may be severely backlogged, delaying the release of important changes. In these scenarios, overall system quality or delivery timing can be at risk. With automated testing, the default strategy is to test all software often and early, ensuring higher quality as a minimum standard.

• Repeatability: The ability to accurately and consistently repeat processes has made troubleshooting easier and streamlined feature transition from development to production.

• Comprehensive metrics: Rather than being limited to only simple metrics, automated collection of performance test data provides a convenient way to store, track, and provide analysis of measured data.

• Greater transparency and control: Previously, Raley’s only learned about production delays as code approached its release date. With CICD, stakeholders now have visibility into day-to-day development operations. With this information, they can know the status of every development project. Rather than relying on educated guesses, their decisions are based on accurate information. This gives them greater business agility since they have a much better idea of when they will they be able to act on market opportunities.

• More efficient testing: The legacy system ran full regression testing to uncover errors, requiring three days to complete. Automated testing is completed in stages, allowing many types of errors to be found much more quickly. For example, configuration errors can be uncovered now in minutes instead of hours.

• Greater reliability: Because the testing cycle is accelerated through the use of test stages, more cycles can be completed, resulting in more reliable software.

• Automated test script creation: When software is written, tests to verify it are added to the automated processes. This substantially streamlines test design and execution.

• Scalability with less complexity and cost: CICD has given Raley’s the ability to implement more functionality with less risk and improved overall quality.

4600 Bohannon Dr, Suite 220 • Menlo Park, California 94025 • 650-523-5000 • sales@griddynamics.com • www.griddynamics.com© 2014 Grid Dynamics International, Inc. All rights reserved. Other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

summary

Replatforming core systems is a major, but sometimes necessary, undertaking for retailers to modernize their operations and maintain relevance with their customers. Part of a successful replatforming project is speed to minimize the cost of the migration. In addition, the new platform should support Continuous Delivery technologies so that innovations can be implemented in short iterations after go-live.

Partnering with Grid Dynamics allowed Raley’s to quickly implement Continuous Delivery technology which resulted in an efficient and high quality adoption of SAP hybris. The use of tools like Qubell increase efficiency of IT organization by centralizing environments management, orchestrating deployment, and providing self-service environments and deployments management portal for the entire organization. By utilizing hybrid cloud technology, Raley’s could also benefit from the advantages of dynamic environments and live upgrades to minimize cost and risk while simplifying the development pipeline.

With the wide breadth of expertise and solutions like the innovative Continuous Delivery, Grid Dyanmics was able to provide the most efficient — and cost effective — long-term solution to delivering rapid, high quality user experience across all channels. Raley’s has substantially improved its teams’ capacity and efficiency for the long-term. Not only can Raley’s implement more modern — and more complex — functionality faster than before, it can do so significantly faster, with greater reliability, and at a lower cost.

about Grid Dynamics Grid Dynamics is a leading provider of open, scalable, next-generation commerce technology solutions for Tier 1 retail. With in-depth expertise in commerce technologies and wide involvement in the open source community, Grid Dynamics helps great companies gain a sustainable business advantage by implementing and managing solutions in the areas of omnichannel platforms, product search, and continuous delivery. To learn more about Grid Dynamics, find us at www.griddynamics.com or by following us on Twitter @GridDynamics.

about Qubell Qubell, an innovator in automated application deployment and configuration management for web-scale applications, addresses a primary challenge in online businesses today: how to reduce cycle times and continuously deliver new applications and features without jeopardizing control, reliability or uptime. The Qubell platform brings true agility to online enterprises by transforming how they create, deploy and run applications. Founded by pioneers in enterprise cloud applications and services, Qubell has its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. For more information, visit www.qubell.com.

about Raley’sRaley’s Family of Fine Stores is the largest family-owned company in the greater Sacramento region. Raley’s has 128 stores in Northern California and Northern Nevada. Raley’s was founded in 1935 in Placerville,CA. Additional information is available at www.raleys.com.