Making Weekend Informatica PowerCenter Deployments A Thing Of The Past… And The Business Benefits That Come With It
Reducing Informatica PowerCenter deployment time from 6 1/2 hours to under an hour (almost 90% reduction) means no more need for weekend deployments…
…if using Scriptless DevOps.
So, we were working with this customer… we’ll just say they’re a European Financial Services company that is also part of the Fortune 500. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to use their logo on this post in the future but this is the best we can do for now. 😉
This customer has a particularly large Informatica PowerCenter project implementation. When I say large, I mean the overall project is over 1 GB. They have been using PowerCenter for many, many years. As you would expect from a team with that level of experience, these guys are “experts” on PowerCenter. They have a very strong internal team that knows how to get the best out of the platform. They also leverage multiple experienced consultants… everything from independent specialist consultants… to large organizations with large project process experience like Cognizant and Accenture. If there was ever a group of PowerCenter experts that would do it the right way, these are the guys.
From a process perspective, the development team does a “partial release” about every 3 months. Each partial release includes all of the changes that have been implemented during that 3 month period. When we got to talking, it came out that their current deployment time for partial releases takes roughly 6 1/2 hours. When I say, “deployment time”, I mean the time from hitting “Enter” to having their existing script “complete” takes roughly 6 1/2 hours. It does not include any of the prep work to define the build, ensure the script is configured correctly, etc. It “ONLY” includes the actual execution times. (There are additional benefits to be gained elsewhere but this blog is focusing exclusively on the business benefit of shortening the deployment window.)
On a very limited basis, they also make small incremental hot fixes during that 3 month cycle but those were very limited changes and they did them very carefully. Doing large scale changes like this on a regular basis would add significant risk of unintended consequences and deploying out of context.
With CrossVista TEAM Server’s Scriptless DevOps approach, they were able to deploy the same patch release (the one that they did every few months and took 6.5 hours) directly from CrossVista’s repo in roughly 50 minutes…. or almost a 90% REDUCTION in deployment time. The percentage reduction in deployment time is great but the real value comes from the fact that it moves from 6.5 hours to under an hour. What does that really bring you?
Weekends are back baby!
The most obvious benefit to workers will be that, with a reduction from 6.5 hours to under an hour, your team no longer has to work weekends!
A 6.5 hour deployment window often “requires” a weekend effort. In some parts of the world, this is especially challenging due to more stringent labor laws. From a strictly financial perspective, weekend efforts are more costly due to the additional weekend pay for all participating team members (both internal and external) adding to the costs. However, they are also a general strain from an overall employee retention perspective. No matter how little someone might complain, nobody wants to work weekends.
Note: If you don’t know where this video is from, then stop reading this blog immediately… well… no… finish the blog… and then immediately go and watch the movie Office Space. It is a classic.
Weekend work, while necessary at times, can kill employee morale. Wouldn’t it be nice if your team could deploy during the week… get it done in under an hour… and, if need be, rollback as well in an hour. This is a huge benefit.
Lower Operational Costs
Know we already touched on it above but, to reinforce the point, there is an actual additional operating cost involved with longer deployment times. Each deployment can include multiple resources either onsite monitoring the deployment or “on call” in case there is a problem. There are typically hourly costs associated with at least some of those resources. Those costs are further magnified by the additional higher fees charged for doing weekend work.
Lower Your Business Risk
Generally speaking, a 6 ½ hour deployment time adds enormous risk. What happens if the deployment breaks at the 6 hour mark and needs to rollback? What do you do? Now you have another 6+ hours to get it back to where it was before. What happens if the rollback fails and you need to restart and/or troubleshoot the rollback? This is a signficant business risk which is heavily mitigated by cutting the deployment/rollback time.
Increased Business Agility And Faster Time To Market
The information supplied by Data Warehouse projects provide enormous insight and benefits to the business. This is the information the business leaders rely on to make critical decisions. Getting additional insight days, weeks, or possibly even months earlier could have a tremendous impact to the business.
With a shorter deployment window, new features can be deployed the moment they are ready for production. You do not have to postpone until a weekend or until some other features are completed so they can be grouped into the same scheduled deployment window. The faster physical deployment time translates into getting your project updates into production sooner and more often.
In Summary
Get your weekends back. If employee morale and retention isn’t enough to justify the change, then take a look at the lower operational costs, lower risks, increased business agility, and faster time to market that you can achieve with CrossVista’s Scriptless DevOps.CrossVista provides a “Scriptless” DevOps solution for enterprise applications that manages change across the SDLC from Development through Production Deployment and everywhere in-between. The scriptless engine is integrated with technologies such as IBM IIB, MQ and WAS, SoftwareAG’s webMethods platform, Informatica’s PowerCenter, Salesforce.com, databases, file based systems, and more. The engine eliminates the need for complex scripts normally required to support these technologies… no more writing a bunch of scripts to manage your SDLC processes.
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