Research Facility Releases Application Updates 4 X Times More Frequently
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- Canada
Product
- LiveRebel
- Bamboo
Tech Stack
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Delivery
- Automated Rollback
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Innovation Output
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
- Life Sciences
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Quality Assurance
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The Canadian research facility is an innovative, scientific collaboration between four research hospitals to operate a centralized, state-of-the-art research-enabling facility. This joint venture involving multiple hospitals pools resources and expertise to achieve excellence and economies of scale. The facility provides a web-based application that serves as a facility management and collaboration platform for researchers from member hospitals and health institutions. It enables users to manage their projects, including tracking genetic information, scheduling and assigning tasks, managing project finances, tracking regulatory and compliance data, and viewing reports. This web-based application is critical to business operations. Users rely on it to pursue research projects and use the facility’s services.
The Challenge
Prior to using LiveRebel, the LIMS team responsible for the application pushed updates once or twice a month. Updates were disruptive but necessary to add new features and fix bugs. To carry them out, the team notified all users of the impending downtime due to the update, published a maintenance window notification on the website, and spent about 1 hour after work hours to push updates and restore service. The IT team often received inquiries on when service would be restored, or complaints about the downtime. Despite the downtime caused by the maintenance windows, the facility’s management pushed for more frequent application updates that quickly responded to feature requests and bugs.
The Solution
To increase release velocity, the team chose LiveRebel because it enabled them to automate deployments without causing any or only minimal downtime. Furthermore, its automated rollback on failure capability gave them the assurances they needed to increase release velocity safely. They integrated LiveRebel with Bamboo, their continuous integration tool, to build out a continuous delivery pipeline. As a result, the team was able to practice continuous delivery safely, by releasing updates from development and testing to production through the automated release pipeline with no downtime. Deployment failures, although rare, are fully rolled back before users are impacted. LiveRebel’s zero downtime update capability enabled the team to release bug fixes as soon as they are available, thereby taking updates to users faster. Major releases occur once a quarter and involve database changes that are run manually which causes some downtime. LiveRebel automated application deployments quickly and safely. Although informed, users are not impacted during updates which are pushed during business hours.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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