Simplifying DevOps for Complex Enterprise Projects

Sanej Bandgar manages Deloitte Canada’s Enterprise Information Management Systems team. His team delivers technology that enables strategic changes for Deloitte’s worldwide client base.

The former valedictorian of the Mumbai University School of Computer Engineering, Sanej has built an impressive career as an ECM expert with deep domain knowledge of OpenText, LiveLink, Microsoft & SAP systems.

Using CloudShare’s virtual IT infrastructure platform, Sanej’s team built a cloud based DevOps environment where his geographically distributed team could connect tools to application environments and share progress with clients via the cloud, “anytime, anywhere”. The result was instant feedback, faster development cycles on complex enterprise projects and higher quality products!

Congratulations, Sanej and Happy CloudSharing!

On-Premise to Virtualized IT Environments
Sanej’s goal was to deliver polished business application environments following every two-week sprint and to be able to pivot quickly based on feedback given during those sprints. To do it right, he needed to make sure (1) his team always has access to the tools necessary to update client environments and that (2) clients always have visibility into the product so that their feedback is based on the most recent “real-world” updates.

Sanej solved for this by moving his team’s tool chain to CloudShare’s virtualized IT infrastructure environments. The cloud Infrastructure-as-a-service environment platform enables an organization to take any on-premise IT system or business application and bring it to the cloud, in less than a minute.

Sanej connected Visual Studio IDEs through preconfigured environment templates and the CloudShare plug-in. The preconfigured environment templates are already pre-configured with all the virtualized infrastructure needed. Meaning, the hardware, servers, networking and configuration are all virtualized and available in one click through the cloud platform. The source code was kept in a GitLab instance hosted on a lightweight CloudShare VM and each version of the client’s environments were connected to these tools within a CloudShare cloud IT account. This meant that any bottlenecks, bugs or breaks were visible to the entire team. As Sanej put it, “the team is geographically dispersed including an offshore team so CloudShare plays a crucial role, allowing the team to work on a self-service virtualized IT environment without any connectivity blockers (no VPN problems, etc…). It even allowed some of the folks to work from home throughout the project!”

Delivering Client Ready Environments – DevOps Style
Once the client’s application environments are connected to an integrated DevOps environment, the application is available on-demand. Sanej explains that “businesses can access the product anywhere and anytime and see value by looking at the product we built, bi-weekly.”

Sanej’s team can share a “Web Access” or “Vanity url”  to the hosted business application and invite technical clients into the back-end as needed. This DevOps approach allows “rapid business solution development” and helps Sanej’s team “fail faster and deliver a solution which meets business requirements while adding real business value.”

Congrats for the elegant, efficient solution Sanej!