ZipCo’s existing solution locked their deployments for an extended period, not showing results of the full CI/CD pipeline run until it had completed. A monolithic Terraform repository and an inflexible tool worked a lot like a traditional git workflow, with multiple pull requests off of the master branch. This was cumbersome, with multiple hoops to jump through. By using env0, they cut deployment times in half, getting back precious time, and now have a better overall perspective of the large infrastructure which they manage and support worldwide.

Tackling hurry up and wait

Prior to using env0, ZipCo would change a branch of one service in their monolithic Terraform repo and then have to merge it through a standard process. This process ended up locking out any other developer from making changes. It was also against a sub-branch of their master code and their integration service would take a long time to check if the change was acceptable. If the change was successful, the propagation then occurred linearly, where each environment would update one-by-one, further lengthening the time to deploy. It wasn’t uncommon for a simple change to take multiple hours to deploy, during which the codebase was locked, preventing anyone else from working on it.

Traditionally, we’d deploy code, go get lunch and hope by the time we came back it was successful. With env0, that time has been drastically cut, coupled with the fact we no longer need to deploy in a linear fashion and can now deploy multiple environments simultaneously.”
Troy Knapp, Senior DevOps Engineer

How env0 helped tame time

• Documentation: env0 dashboards showed ZipCo what was going on in their environments. In the past, developers would shortcut tests or use backdoors that would enable them to deploy environments in ways teammates didn’t know about. By using env0, all the “tribal knowledge” was brought to the forefront and displayed clearly on the dashboard.
• Parallel Deployments: Prior to env0, ZipCo would have to deploy their code linearly. After moving to env0, multiple environments could now be deployed simultaneously, greatly reducing the overall time to deploy, and giving back precious time.
• Robust UI: The interface env0 provides has given each developer a deeper insight in a much more organized fashion that doesn't rely on local execution of code. The interface is also much easier to understand, well documented and has fewer clicks than their previous solution.
• Support: Since moving to env0, ZipCo has a quicker turnaround on questions and issues, and a much stronger relationship with the support team than with other vendors. There is a direct support channel and issues are often solved within hours, versus having to wait days or even weeks.

The constant evolution

There are still daily challenges ZipCo faces as they continue to integrate their worldwide Azure solution with env0. As each challenge presents itself, the flexibility of env0 coupled with the newfound agility gives ZipCo multiple paths to solve issues they traditionally saw as not reasonably achievable. The env0 platform is constantly growing and ZipCo is adapting it to fit the needs of their ever-changing environment. And the result is a superior experience for their worldwide customer base.