How Zeotap Increased Deployment Velocity 36x

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Zeotap is the next-generation Customer Data Platform. Its Customer Intelligence Platform (CIP) empowers brands to unify, enhance, and activate customer data in a cookieless future, all while putting consumer privacy and compliance front and centre. Recognized by Gartner as a "Cool Vendor," Zeotap works with over 80 of the world's top 100 brands, including P&G, Audi, and Heineken. It is also the founding member of ID+, a universal marketing ID initiative.

Modernizations Create More Modernizations

Aditya Chandra, VP of Infrastructure and Security, was in the middle of modernizing Zeotap’s Continuous Integration pipelines when he realized the project’s scope needed to be drastically increased. The switch from Jenkins to CircleCI exposed flaws in the Continuous Delivery process.

Zeotap had amassed over 400 Jenkins pipelines for 40 applications. With no deployment standardization, applications had a change failure rate of roughly 15-25%. Zeotap managed that risk by bundling deployments together and scheduling 4 hour downtime windows. During the downtime window, a team of three developers would slowly roll changes out. Zeotap then used a 10 day post deployment feedback loop to identify any issues the deployment might have caused. Once an issue was identified, it could take Zeotap 4 hours to roll back to the last working version.

We avoided deployments because if things went badly, we couldn’t rollback.

Aditya Chandra | VP of Infrastructure and Security

Jenkins didn’t provide Aditya with any visibility into the company’s deployment velocity or the deployment success rate, but Aditya estimated that the existing process only allowed Zeotap to deploy once a month. Even if Aditya was able to modernize CI, without an efficient CD solution, Zeotap wouldn’t be able to scale software delivery.

Deployments are like water; you only notice when it’s bad.

Aditya Chandra | VP of Infrastructure and Security

Deployment Nirvana

Aditya turned to Harness for a better software delivery experience. He was able to onboard 40 applications in the first three months using Harness.

Now, Zeotap is able to deploy multiple times a day using a standardized pipeline and automated rollbacks. The company’s deployment frequency has increased roughly 36x because developers are given the independence to deploy on their own schedules.

A variety of deployment strategies are available to developers, such as blue-green deployments. Deployment effort reduced from a team of developers for 4 hours to 1 developer for 30 minutes, and rollback time reduced from 4 hours to seconds. Subsequently, developers have more time to work on high-priority projects.

Harness helps us prevent brain drain by removing the frustration engineers face while deploying.

Aditya Chandra | VP of Infrastructure and Security

Harness also helped Zeotap reach GDPR, ISO27001, and CSA STAR compliance. Using Harness’ advanced RBAC, audit, and reporting capabilities, Aditya is able to pull detailed historical deployment information instantaneously.

RBAC allows me to see who built the artifact, when it was deployed, and if it was successful. This has been critical for GDPR compliance.