All case studies / Eurofins
IT teams across the Eurofins network complete hundreds of deployments a day with Octopus
About Eurofins
Eurofins Scientific is an international group of life sciences company, which provide a unique range of analytical testing services to clients across multiple industries.
The group believes it is a global leader in food, environment, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic product testing, discovery pharmacology, forensics, advanced material sciences, and in agroscience contract research services. It’s also one of the global independent market leaders in certain testing and laboratory services for genomics and in the support of clinical studies, as well as in BioPharma contract development and manufacturing. Eurofins is also one of the leading global emerging players in esoteric and molecular clinical diagnostic testing. With over 63,000 staff across a network of over 1,000 independent companies in 60 countries, generally specialized by end client markets and operating over 950 laboratories, Eurofins offers a portfolio of over 200,000 analytical methods to evaluate the safety, identity, composition, authenticity, origin, traceability, and purity of biological substances and products. It also develops and carries out innovative clinical diagnostic testing services. The group’s objective is to provide customers with high-quality and innovative services, accurate results on time and, when requested, expert advice by its highly-qualified staff.
In Eurofins Group, there are over 1,000 IT people working in software development, distributed across multiple locations and many IT teams.
Challenges
IT teams across the Eurofins network wanted to automate their CI/CD pipelines
Before using Octopus, the delivery process was semi-automated, included manual steps, and took longer than necessary. It was also challenging to coordinate and replicate. These processes could be more mature, and software developers in the IT teams across the Eurofins network wanted a tool to help them automate and standardize deployments.
As an international network of independent companies in 60 countries, and operating over 950 laboratories, IT teams across the Eurofins network needed a better way to manage complex software delivery. Teams needed to tailor each deployment to various locations, and they wanted to manage these easily in one place. With hundreds of deployments to many environments, the tool also needed to be able to orchestrate and automate deployment at scale.
Solution
Eurofins IT teams standardize deployments at scale with Octopus
A Solution Architect, hired in 2018 to Eurofins, noticed that a small number of IT teams were using Octopus Deploy across the Eurofins network. Having had success with Octopus in a previous company, the Solution Architect encouraged wider adoption of the tool. He took ownership of the challenge, and his team hosted Octopus as a service that they could offer to consumers, providing guidance and support to drive uptake. IT teams were impressed by the capabilities of Octopus and now a significant number of them across the Eurofins network use it to handle their deployments.
Octopus integrated easily with IT teams' existing tools, helping them automate their CI/CD pipelines. Using lifecycles to control their complex environment structure also meant teams could easily manage deployments across environments.
Now, IT teams across the Eurofins network use Octopus Deploy’s Tenants feature for complex configuration management over different locations, laboratories, sectors, and industries. IT teams use variable sets, tenant tags, and tenant tag sets to deliver to multiple laboratories and locations in an environment. Tenant tags help teams manage deployments as they can conveniently organize, configure, and deploy based on these tags. The step templates feature is also heavily used to standardize processes across multiple deployment projects.
IT teams across the Eurofins network also use Octopus’s Runbooks feature to manage infrastructure-related activities, including set up and routine maintenance of VMs.
We had a challenge with delivering software to laboratories at scale. With Octopus, we’re able to orchestrate and coordinate progression across multiple environments in sync, and now a single Octopus orchestration process can deploy multiple services to multiple environments in one go.
Eurofin’s CI/CD pipeline using Octopus
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Value
Increased deployment frequency with automation
Using Octopus, IT teams across the Eurofins network conduct hundreds of deployments a day. Where teams once used different processes, leading to slow deployments and coordination challenges, they now orchestrate complex deployments to different locations all with one tool. Using Octopus has helped IT teams across the Eurofins network mature their deployment pipelines, automating and standardizing processes across the organisation.
We’ve used tenants any way you can think of using them. With so many laboratories, locations, industry sectors, and regions, tenants have been incredibly useful. The ability to group them by tags makes it easy and convenient to do very granular to very broad deployments.
Improved developer experience with deployments that just work
Before the widespread adoption of Octopus, many IT teams across Eurofins network managed their own process. Now, they have everything they need for automated deployments, managing strict environment testing while orchestrating deployments with ease. The IT teams across the Eurofins network now rely heavily on Octopus. Octopus makes their processes simpler, automates deployments for testing, and ensures everything runs smoothly.
We can’t see another tool offering the features we get from Octopus, from tenant delivery to step templates and the single view dashboard. We’d have a lot of upset people if Octopus was no longer in use.
Reduced risk through standardized processes
Before using Octopus, complex deployments for the IT teams in the Eurofins network were a challenge. With so many deployments to manage over multiple locations and laboratories, there was a risk of something going wrong. But with Octopus, IT teams are confident that deployments will just work. With automation and standardization in place, teams have confidence deploying to production, having pushed and tested the same binaries through multiple stages of release lifecycles in lower environments and trust there won’t be any delivery issues. Meanwhile, deployments are faster than ever.
Octopus has created a sense that everything will run smoothly, as we can do hundreds of deployments a day, and it all works seamlessly and painlessly. The expectation now is that there isn’t going to be a problem, and that it will all just work.