By: Hadriel Tzuk, DevOps and System Engineering Team Leader, Verint
“Optimizing our processes is a key value for success. Thanks to VMware, we made the deployment a non-issue, which helped us, develop much faster than we used to. Faster deployments help us add more content to each release, and deliver a solid and stable product. It allows us to look forward for new technologies and new approaches”.
I am happy to share our Verint strategic technological endeavors which enabled us to automate our DevOps & QA environments by using the VMware private cloud technology. At Verint, a leading global provider of security and intelligence data mining software, the deployment process was done manually by the developers, required long working hours and involved many configuration failures.
We were looking for an auto-deployment solution for DevOps and QA environments. We consider VMware to be a major partner for all of our IT moves: Verint products are based on the VMware vSphere hypervisor as an OEM, so there is a strong partnership between the companies. Therefore, when we decided it would be too complex to develop an in-house solution, our first choice was VMware. We used VMware technology to build a private cloud with dedicated self-service portal, where developers can auto-deploy their own development environment with one push of a button. Today, using the new portal, it takes our developers only up to 40 minutes to auto-deploy a working environment while in the past it took half a day up to day. 20% of development costs were saved and there are no longer installation and configuration failures.
VMware products enabled us to meet the requirements by automating processes for development and QA teams. We chose to deploy the VMware private cloud solutions, vCloud Suite Advanced – The Enterprise Ready Private Cloud Software, which includes several components. A dedicated special self-service portal was built for developers. The portal was built using VMware vCloud Suite Advance and its following tools: VMware vRealize Automation, VMware vRealize Orchestrator, VMware vRealize Operations and VMware vRealize Log Insight. The infrastructure for the project was built using the VMware vSphere hypervisor which optimizes the usage of the hardware infrastructure. The project integration in Verint Israel was done by the VMware Professional Services Organization and Partner Terasky.
The project is considered a huge success: once the private cloud was ready to use it dramatically upgraded the development processes for Verint developers, DevOps and QA teams. We definitely feel every day the added value of the project: While in the past the developer had to spend a half day up to a whole day to manually install a development environment, now, when he is using the new a VMware portal, it takes him up to 40 minutes to automatically deploy this environment. Expensive development time is saved. The developers efforts are concentrated were they are really needed – in development and not in deployment. There are no longer installation and configuration failures due to mistakes done in the manual process. The Portal uses a predefined and tested blueprints that are being automatically deployed, so there are almost no mistakes in the deployment process. Resources are used wisely, reliably and with better accessibility. The Verint DevOps team is responsible for building and updating the blueprints and also integrating a Continuous Deployment (CI) process that is updating each environment with the needed software/product version.
VMware solutions include a central resources management system. The management system monitors the development environments and once resources are not used, they are moved back into the central resource center. This is a costs saving process since less hardware in needed and used. The project’s total costs saving are about 20% of deployment costs.
