All case studies / Auror
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Auror deploys up to 18 times a day with Octopus
About Auror
Auror helps protect retailers from crime with an industry-leading crime intelligence platform. Over 70,000 retail and law enforcement users across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand use Auror to report, solve, and prevent crime in their stores and communities.
Auror serves major retailers and hosts their infrastructure in Azure data centers. Due to data sovereignty laws, Auror ensures each country has dedicated resources with controls for sharing data. In some countries, like New Zealand, retail stores from different chains share intelligence with one another and law enforcement to ensure the information is actionable. In other countries, like the US, companies often only share their information internally.
It's a priority for Auror that its global customers have data sovereignty, so they comply with privacy laws - regardless of their location.
Because everyone knows that once they hit ‘merge’ it’s in production, everyone is really conscientious about testing. Deploying multiple times a day means you can test exhaustively because it’s such a small change. If something fails, it’s found very quickly as you’ve written the code so recently.
Challenges
Manual deployments often took days to complete
Before implementing Octopus Deploy, Auror’s deployments to production were manual and often took days to complete. The team deployed to Windows virtual machines (VMs), remoting into each machine and copying files or deploying from Visual Studio.
In 2018, when a major Australian retailer became a customer, Auror re-evaluated its deployment pipeline, and brought in consultants to help select the best deployment automation tool. The consultants recommended Octopus Deploy to advance Auror's product and user experience.
Auror’s key goal was streamlining deployments. Engineers were spending too much time on what they could be doing in one click.
Solution
One-click deployments, guided failures, and improved developer experience
Adopting Octopus helped Auror mature its CI/CD pipeline.
First, the team reduced the number of clicks to deploy to one-click per environment. But they wanted even more efficiency.
When Auror migrated from Windows VMs to Azure Web Apps and Azure SQL, the team found that Octopus Deploy’s guided failure mode complemented their tools. It meant failed deployments could be re-started with a single step, rather than re-starting the whole deployment.
Auror focuses on the developer experience, and developers can emulate the entire platform on their laptops, accelerating their process. Before merging a change into the main branch, another developer or a QA engineer pairs with the developer, and verifies if they’ve met Auror’s high-quality bar and made the appropriate changes.
After they merge a change into the main branch, Octopus triggers an immediate deployment to test. Automated tests then start, and after they pass, Octopus pushes changes to all production environments, including a customer-facing sandbox environment that Auror uses for sales demos and for customers to test integrations.
Auror’s DORA metrics reflect its advanced automation process and deployment maturity. Auror metrics are in DORA’s ‘elite’ category, which the team says is only possible because they use Octopus.
Auror's CI/CD pipeline
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Value
Faster releases with happier developers and customers
Time savings and happier developers
Auror now deploys from code to production with thorough testing and without intervention. Auror's developers are happier as well. If there’s a bug, they can get a fix released in an hour.
Recently we migrated our CI from TeamCity to Github Actions. Because we had different systems in place for CI and CD, it was easy to migrate our CI tasks piece by piece without impacting the stability of our deployments via Octopus deploy.
Shorter release cycle
Auror deploys to production up to 18 times per day. Octopus provides speed and stability, which is paramount for its operations.
Mature CI/CD pipeline
Octopus streamlined Auror’s deployment process while connecting seamlessly to other end-to-end tools, and facilitating complex deployments for the team's GitHub Actions workflow.
Faster delivery of product improvements and satisfied customers
When the pandemic hit, one of the world’s biggest retailers asked for the capability to report when a customer threatened to spit on an employee. Auror impressed them by adding the report and pushing it to production in 3 hours. Auror regularly receives praise for quickly responding to change requests and delivering value.
Now, whenever a PR is merged in GitHub, Octopus deploys it to QA, waits for automated tests to finish, and then without any intervention it will deploy to all of our production environments. All these workflows are orchestrated with Octopus and this is the kind of thing that helps us do so many deployments in a day. Once you’ve merged, it’s headed for production, there’s no bottleneck.