Accelerating software delivery

Continuous delivery is an IT trend that is quickly becoming a best practice in the delivery of software. It is a software engineering approach in which teams produce frequent, incremental software releases and ensure that the software can be reliably released at any time. Following continuous delivery practices speeds time to market dramatically and improves quality. It also allows for faster introduction of new features and lower deployment risk. Organizations that have implemented continuous delivery practices can experience dramatic ROI as a result of having done so.

Neustar has leveraged continuous delivery practices with CloudBees and Jenkins to shorten development times by 25 percent, increase build frequency by a factor of four and significantly reduced its IT infrastructure overhead.

“Our continuous delivery practices, based on Jenkins, have enabled us to automate our development and deployment processes and fostered a DevOps culture, where everyone works together with shared goals to optimize software quality and delivery. This software delivery process has empowered our development team to build and deliver software as quickly as possible,” said Jason Shawn, director of cloud services and platforms at Neustar, Inc. “In addition to the power of Jenkins, CloudBees’ DEV@cloud service maximizes the value we receive from Jenkins because it enables our team to focus on development instead of administering tools and infrastructure.”

Neustar is known for providing businesses with back-end, mission-critical services that must be delivered with a high degree of reliability. For instance, Neustar manages the operation of a cloud-based digital rights library, the administration of top-level Internet domains and the provision of DNS services for businesses across the globe.

Because customers depend on Neustar services for business-critical operations, reliability is critical — both in the software Neustar’s development team builds and in the processes they use to build it. Neustar required a solution that its 600 developers across 24 teams could use to speed application development along 50+ service lines while ensuring consistent, reliable delivery.

Using CloudBees’ hosted Jenkins for continuous delivery, Neustar produced tangible results such as:
Infrastructure maintenance overhead reduced: Previously, three engineers worked full time maintaining Jenkins instances and builds; now one developer handles the responsibility, part time.
Development time reduced 25 percent: According to Jason Shawn, the staff eliminated many problems that used to cause builds to fail.
Builds are being run four times as frequently: Many jobs that used to run nightly now run three or four times a day, and other jobs that ran only periodically, on demand, are now running nightly.

“Neustar represents a classic case of a company motivated to improve its software processes. They executed their planning and transition to continuous delivery flawlessly,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, chief technology officer of CloudBees and founder of the Jenkins open source project. “Customers of all sizes in many industries around the globe are seeing the benefits of moving to continuous delivery. Leveraging the power of Jenkins on the CloudBees’ Platform, Jason and his team have achieved compelling results and contributed very real value back to the business.”

“The goal with our CloudBees Jenkins-based delivery platform is to continue to improve our processes, and ultimately to build an automation pipeline that goes from check-in, to build, to test and to delivery in one fell swoop,” says Shawn. “That kind of improvement enables us to move from feature request to deployment very quickly, and that is what matters to our customers and our business.”