All case studies / Axpo
Axpo’s deployments went from hours to minutes with Octopus
About Axpo
Axpo is Switzerland’s largest producer of renewable energy. It’s an international leader in energy trading and the marketing of solar and wind power. The organization has been operating for over 100 years and has more than 6,000 employees. Axpo’s Trading & Sales business area operates in 30+ countries across Europe, North America, and Asia.
The Trading IT department, known as Trading Information Management (TIM), has several teams. Each supports the delivery of Axpo’s products and services. The Energy Trading and Risk Management (ETRM) team is responsible for the development of Axpo’s trading platform.
Challenges
Axpo needed to simplify manual deployments to reduce risk and cost
Before Octopus, Axpo’s deployments were manual. The ETRM team deploys to a heritage platform that makes the process complex. With manual deployments, there was an error rate of around 50% in their deployments, and each deployment took a lot of time. Developers also had to closely monitor each deployment to make sure it went well.
Axpo wanted to automate deployments to reduce risk, increase frequency, and save time and money.
Axpo also has many teams working on different projects, each with their own tooling. Axpo needed a solution flexible enough so teams could choose when it worked best alongside the other tools they were using for deployments.
The biggest advantage of Octopus is that it elevates deployments and environments and treats them like core features, not something that you force into another tool.
Solution
Axpo chose Octopus to automate its complex deployments
Ceri Lewis used Octopus in a previous role. When he started at Axpo several years ago, he introduced Octopus as part of a full delivery stack. The team started small with 4 to 5 projects, which has grown to hundreds of projects today. Other teams in the organization soon saw the benefits and started to use Octopus too. Now multiple teams across Axpo use Octopus to automate their deployments.
As some components of the product architecture are old, the team appreciate the flexibility of Octopus. It lets them write bespoke customer scripts that work with their deployment processes. The product’s complexity and the number of teams working on it also mean they need to spin up multiple environments. Using Octopus to spin up environments on-demand helps them manage different streams of work. Axpo now uses Octopus to manage complex deployments across 20 to 30 environments, using variable scoping to further improve processes.
In a large organization like ours, it is important to have a tool that is flexible to the needs of different teams. Octopus is great as each team can integrate it as they need and it works with the tools they use.
Axpo's ERTM team CI/CD pipeline
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Value
Reduced error rates from over 50% to almost zero
Before using Octopus, Axpo’s manual deployments were risky and difficult. Staff had to focus on deployments going to plan, which wasn’t cost- or time-efficient.
With Octopus, deployments went from failing 50% of the time to almost always being successful. The team are confident their deployments will work, and this means they can focus on improving the product.
Before Octopus it was scary to do deployments. We were apprehensive which was why we had monthly release cycles as we had to make sure everything was correct. But with Octopus it’s so refreshingly easy to click a button and feel confident that a deployment will just work.
Adding value sooner with faster and more frequent deployments
Deployments at Axpo used to take hours and needed someone to watch them to prevent errors. However, Octopus has reduced deployment time to a couple of minutes without oversight. Even when a deployment is more complex and takes longer, no one spends time supervising it. The team are confident the deployment will run successfully without manual intervention. This has increased deployment frequency. Axpo has moved from monthly release cycles to fortnightly deployments, or more regularly as needed.
The great thing about Octopus is that you can do it once and then it’s repeatable. Manual deployments used to take us hours, but now we’re deploying in minutes and more frequently too. Even if a deployment takes longer no one has to sit there to wait for the deployment to run.
Improved security and auditability
Security and auditability are important to Axpo. Octopus provides the ETRM team with fine-grained access control so they can assign roles based on the environment and project. Octopus also lets the team meet auditing requirements by making it quick and easy to pull information about what’s deployed where and by who. Seeing this at a glance on the dashboard also helps them manage their complex deployments across up to 30 environments.
From an organizational perspective auditing is very important, so the fact that Octopus has it all right there makes it so much easier for us.