Infoblox is a business intelligence software company that provides DNS management and security for more than 12,000 customers, including 70% of the Fortune 500. They help companies to scale, simplify, and secure their hybrid networks to be safe and secure in the cloud-first world.
Its mission is to simplify complex distributed networking and security by delivering modern, cloud-first networking and security services that automate and streamline NetOps, SecOps, DevOps, and user experiences. Infoblox has a unique platform that integrates advanced analytics with actionable insights to give users the visibility and control they need to manage their network infrastructure. This allows businesses to optimize their network performance and improve security.
As a 1000-person, $900 million organization, Infoblox IT needed help with its digital transformation. Like many young IT companies, Infoblox relies on SaaS applications to run its business. Salesforce for CRM, Oracle Fusion middleware, Workday for HRMS, Dell Boomi as the integration platform, Tableau for business intelligence, and Marketo for marketing.
The challenge they faced was how to standardize and automate the application development process in order to achieve enterprise-level DevOps transformation. They needed a way to achieve this without sacrificing agility or productivity so that their company could consistently release software efficiently, which would ultimately lead them down an efficient path towards continuous improvement.
With custom Jenkins solutions, Infoblox developers were struggling to integrate with security and quality. The process was manual with no capability to automate the end-to-end release process.
The tools only let developers work on a single branch at once--not an ideal situation for building maps that need frequent updates. The static code analysis tool (Sonarqube) was not fully integrated either; it lacked developer-friendly features like integrated testing, Git tasks, unified metrics, or dashboards which would have allowed them more insights into their productivity, agility, and security, quality, and operations dimensions.
Infoblox decided to look for an open DevOps orchestration platform that would work with all of their business-critical applications. They felt like this was the smartest investment to find the right technology to help them achieve speed to market.
When considering a "build versus buy" decision, buying was a better alternative to rolling out their own DevOps and automated CI/CD pipeline for 10 business applications since this would require at least 10+ people and two years.
Opsera replaced Infoblox’s manual Salesforce CI/CD process with automation. Previously, merging code and resolution of conflicts was a considerable time commitment that required one to two days from everyone on the team.
The Git commit dashboard now enables Infoblox to anticipate the size of the release based on the scale of commits. If 250 components are being changed, they can coordinate with all of the developers, product managers, and the QA team to ensure everything has been tested. They are able to begin engaging early in development to reduce the amount of firefighting at the last minute.
The build and deploy dashboard empowers developers to use automated deployment enabling them to focus on development, code quality, and security rather than deployment.
The hygiene of the development and deployment environment is improved as developers have the freedom to deploy while engineers now have visibility into the number of variables deployed to each environment, whether they have been QA tested, and the quality of the build. This substantially improved engineers' productivity.
Prior to Opsera, Infoblox engineers relied on multiple consoles to check the logs, errors, security scan results, and quality summary. Opsera’s platform comes with a single pane of glass that provides updates from all DevOps tools in unified dashboards and contextualized logs. It empowers developers with valuable metrics and insights.
A team, 60% smaller than would be required to build it themselves, was able to automate end-to-end release automation with security, quality gates, and unified insights in less than a couple of months.
Infoblox now has an enterprise DevOps platform that will accommodate application development for all of the organization's enterprise SaaS applications.
Going forward, the DevOps team at Infoblox will be setting up automated CI/CD pipelines across various SaaS applications – Oracle Fusion, Boomi, AWS Data services, and ServiceNow.
