Overview

NetApp's enterprise IT organization is responsible for planning, building, and operating more than 600 business applications, global technology infrastructure, cybersecurity, and end-user services for ~11,000 employees, ~5,000 contractors, partners, and customers. Our specific team within NetApp IT delivers cloud, DevOps platform, and infrastructure services for custom application development and operations.

Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

DevOps plays an important role at NetApp, delivering critical applications that are unique to our company. DevOps teams need a cloud platform to build and run applications. However, NetApp’s traditional IT infrastructure no longer met DevOps needs. While implementing rapid changes to software is critical in app development, the process was challenging in the existing infrastructure, often requiring multiple changes and resulting in downtime. Providing servers and storage in a data center helped, but it was costly and couldn’t effectively meet DevOps’ rising data-driven demands. Having no central source for resources slowed productivity as developers spent a disproportionate amount of time searching for tools.

NetApp IT explored the “off the shelf” options for a new DevOps platform. Using a single public cloud with integrated technologies could potentially support data and capability needs, but it was costly and caused vendor lock-in. We liked the automation and access possible with software-as-a-service (SaaS), but no existing solution provided the level of customization required for DevOps. We also considered allowing each application team to use a separate cloud service based on their needs, but it would require IT and developers to navigate conflicting governance, processes, and technologies. We determind that to realize our vision for a new DevOps infrastructure, we would need to build a hybrid multicloud platform from the ground up.

The Solution

NetApp IT set out to create a world-class hybrid multicloud platform with everything needed to create applications built in. To maximize developer productivity, agility and accessibility, we wanted our platform delivered via a single end-to-end solution as a service to DevOps teams. It was key that it have consistent data and storage management across both public and private clouds. Based on our expertise as Customer-1 of a leading cloud-led, data-centric software company, we knew that NetApp’s portfolio of technologies and services, notably ONTAP, would provide a robust data fabric. We assembled a project team and evaluated a range of considerations related to operations, developer workflow, costs, and IT management.

We set four key goals for the platform:

• Increase the speed of application changes
• Enable developers to focus more on writing code
• Introduce automation to reduce production deployment risk when adding new technologies and architectures
• Reduce costs

The results

We built and implemented our unique internal hybrid cloud platform, CloudOne, in strategic stages. It provides everything developers need in a single end-to-end solution as a service with automation, tools, pipeline infrastructure, integrated security, and private and public clouds all included. CloudOne combines cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, microservices, self-service catalogs and development pipelines. It offers seamless, integrated environments for DevOps teams to build and run custom apps. CloudOne’s infrastructure is highly automated, growing and shrinking as needed to meet application demand using Infrastructure-as-Code. CloudOne significantly improved the speed of application changes and deployment. Applications built in CloudOne often have daily to weekly updates, compared to the prior process of monthly or quarterly releases. We replaced manual provisioning, which used to take up to a week, with self-service and automation that enables provisioning in only minutes. With CI/CD pipelines, our developers can deliver source code changes to applications in just 20 minutes, a previously manual process that took up to a week.

CloudOne continues to not only improve efficiencies and productivity of NetApp developers, we've realized real cost savings. By enabling production in container workloads and the ability to utilize Spot by NetApp to take advantage of AWS Spot Instance savings, we reduced our DevOps public cloud costs by up to 70 percent.

Metrics

CloudOne has significantly improved development operations and efficiencies, by dramatically reducing the timelines of many key development operations.

• Before CloudOne, application provisioning required 7-10 tickets and 5-7 business days. After CloudOne, the same task requires no tickets, thanks to full self-service automation, and is completed in less than 30 minutes.
• Before CloudOne, application change deployment times were 1 week at the lowest with manual steps. After CloudOne, application changes are fully automated and can be delivered in 20 minutes, allowing DevOps teams to set any schedule needed.
• Before CloudOne, NetApp IT was only able to provision 40 application environments in a six-month timeframe. After CloudOne, the team provisioned 210 in the same amount of time.
• Before CloudOne, infrastructure scaling required 1-2 weeks with app changes. After CloudOne, it’s automatically elastic.

The Technology

• Docker Containers
• Kubernetes (Red Hat Openshift and Rancher)
• ServiceNow
• Azure DevOps
• Opensource application stacks (MongoDB, Springboot, NodeJS, AngularJS, etc.)
• AWS
• Azure
• Helm
• Ansible, Python, Powershell
• jFrog

NetApp Technologies and Services

• All-Flash storage
• ONTAP
• StorageGRID
• Trident
• Spot by NetApp
• CVO/CVS

Disruptive Factor

Though our CloudOne project began with solving a problem that we shared with many across the technology industry, it is also reflective of the potential for the future of the hybrid multicloud platform. As experts in cloud-led technologies and the IT team managing the robust data demands of a dynamic and complex global Fortune 500 organization, NetApp IT was well-positioned to pioneer this new platform and transform our DevOps application infrastructure so it can continue to grow and evolve well into the future.

Driving the vision for and building CloudOne required immense creativity, strategy, and commitment. CloudOne also required a cultural change within our organization, as stakeholders needed to lean in with an automation-first mindset and embrace speed knowing that automation reduces risk. Over the course of nearly a year, our team educated IT stakeholders, application teams and executives on the business value of the project.

With no known comparable platform for DevOps in the industry, our team designed, built and implemented every aspect of CloudOne. It was a significant undertaking. Our team needed to learn and acquire new skills and technologies. Developers and operations leaders needed to think and act differently, and we undertook a major education effort to teach developers to architect and develop cloud-native applications. Today, CloudOne is an asset to our business and a model to customers, partners and fellow industry leaders.

Shining Moment

Currently our CloudOne platform runs over 60 production applications. We continue to evolve the platform to incorporate new technologies and capabilities. I frequently share the CloudOne story with NetApp customers through our IT-on-IT program, “NetApp on NetApp,” and they often ask where and how they can buy it, though it is not publicly sold. This tremendous IT peer recognition is truly reflective of the importance of this pioneering work for business and technology.