RAC: DevOps adoption

The Client

RAC is a motoring club and mutual organisation offering motoring, insurance, travel and financial services for its 840,000 members with a revenue of more than $670 million in 2016.

Like many organisations, RAC faces pressure to increase the quality and breadth of services while containing costs. Digital platforms are seen as a key enabler to deliver new services and higher customer engagement at a lower operational cost. But the RAC has issues with legacy systems and processes and faces a comprehensive challenge to modernise its application suite.

RAC Group IT Services provides IT application and infrastructure support to all RAC divisions. With a large backlog of legacy applications and tools, and with competing BAU support demands, Group IT was finding it difficult to modernise its software delivery to support the organisation’s commercial demands.

Group IT’s aim was to build an agile software delivery capability which would not only deliver higher business value but that would enable it to capitalise on a migration to the cloud.

The Problem

RAC asked Mechanical Rock to review their software delivery capability based on our specialist DevOps and cloud expertise. The review highlighted four areas for improvement (see diagram)

Following the review, Group IT endorsed the plan and engaged MagenTys to deliver :

1. Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) via our Kickstart Training & coaching for developers, testers and business users
2. A modern web application framework using Angular 2 and ASP.net Web API
3. A continuous delivery pipeline for their .net applications that enabled one-click, zero-downtime deployments
4. An extended delivery pipeline to Azure to deploy the first PAAS cloud applications for RAC
5. Software development standards including templated deployment processes and coding standards

Mechanical Rock's recommendations for improving RACWA's software delivery model

The Solution

The changes enabled RAC Group IT to rapidly turn around their backlog of legacy .net applications and move them to a cost-effective Azure hosting solution.

It further built a platform for the future expansion of RAC's digital footprint in the cloud.

The automated delivery pipeline in particular allowed Group IT developers to focus on delivering application code to customers, instead of worrying about internal IT ‘plumbing’.

The use of blue-green deployments meant that changes could be delivered in working hours, with zero downtime and at the click of a button.

The Benefits

• A modern, light-weight Angular2 application framework
• Templated build and deployment standards
• Cross team collaboration using BDD
• One-click, zero-downtime deployments during office hours using a blue/ green model
• Automated deployment to Azure
• High quality reliable code upfront, with BDD style automated tests, eliminating rework
• Lower overall cost of development