A large Australian video-game retailer has revealed how it automated and has continued to modernise its software deployment pipeline with Octopus Deploy.
Brendan McGill, software development manager at EB Games, indicated the retailer had streamlined and improved devops procedures as a result.
“We use built-in Octopus steps whenever possible to eliminate the need for custom scripts. This allows us to outsource maintenance of deployment scripts and allows us to focus on our job,” McGill said in the case study.
EB Games had sought both to scale and modernise its e-commerce platform as the company expanded, including a move to micro-services deployed to Windows Server virtual machines (VMs) running in AWS.
EB Games Australia bills itself as the country’s largest “video game and pop culture” retailer, offering games, accessories, and merchandise. Launching in 1997, the company now has 370 physical stores as well as e-tail.
“My favourite part of the Octopus ECS support is that we can configure a task definition using the Octopus UI and export the underlying task definition if we need to customise it further,” McGill added.
Previously, web applications had to be deployed manually, including copying and updating files. Clusters were configured with CloudFormation templates, defining tasks and custom scripting to automate both deployment and certain maintenance tasks, according to the case study.
EB Games has containerised e-commerce services via Amazon ECS hosting, which the company felt was simpler than Kubernetes. Initially, four micro-services were containerised with each becoming a separate project in Octopus, delivering greater control over deployments, it said.
With Octopus, the company reduces the need for custom scripting and also centralise configuration management. A manual process with Powershell scripts is now done without any custom scripting, for example.
Overall, Octopus enabled the firm to move to a CI/CD pipeline that better suits its team and needs — incorporating Atlassian BitBucket for source control, Jetbrains TeamCity for builds, and Octopus for deployments to AWS.
Octopus this summer added the ability to add automatic retries to deployments, which it said in the release announcement would boost success rates as well as automation.
“This lets you enable retries automatically from a failed action. The result is fewer manual interventions when transient connectivity issues interrupt your deployments,” the company explained.
Read the full case study on the Octopus Deploy website.
( Image by David Englund from Pixabay )
