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Skandia went from quarterly deployments to 10,000 deployments a month with Octopus

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Requirements

  • Automation
  • Repeatability
  • Reduce human error
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Company

  • 101 - 1,500 employees
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Industry

  • Finance
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Requirements

  • Automation
  • Repeatability
  • Reduce human error
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Company

  • 2500+ employees
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Industry

  • Finance

About Skandia

Skandia is a Swedish financial services company that has been operating since 1855. It provides insurance, banking, and asset management services. Skandia creates security through higher pensions, a healthy working life, and sustainable investments. Today, it has close to 1.9 million customers, of which 1.5 million also own the company. Skandia has almost SEK 800 billion under management and long-term commitments to owners, customers, and society.

Challenges

Skandia’s complex manual deployments took 2 days to complete

Skandia’s deployments were complicated and risky. The team held meetings before and after each deployment to ensure everything went smoothly. In order to coordinate the deployment - teams also had a 30+ page checklist for each deployment. If something changed, they updated, reprinted, and redistributed the checklist. The process involved many team members and took days. If one team opted out of a deployment, this led to problems completing the deployment. 

It was only feasible to deploy once per quarter, and it took at least 2 days to get through the manual deployment processes. Team members had to complete deployments outside operating hours in case something went wrong. They often had to deploy hotfixes on the day to remain operational.

Solution

Skandia used Octopus to achieve frequent, on-demand deployments

To improve their deployment processes, the Skandia team created a vision of where they wanted to be. This included frequent, on-demand deployments, fully automated pipelines, and empowered teams. They chose Octopus Deploy to bring their vision to life.

It was easy to migrate their workflows into Octopus and get started. The team began with their applications, then moved higher-risk database deployments into Octopus. Now, they use one space for all their deployments with each team empowered to manage their own processes. They use a mix of their own step templates and those from the Octopus community library to automate their entire deployment process.

Octopus has empowered Skandia’s developers to be autonomous, with guardrails that reduce human error and maintain security. Using Octopus also let the team rapidly increase their deployment frequency and reduce the number of people needed per deployment. With solid, reliable, and repeatable processes in Octopus, Skandia deploys over 10,000 times per month across 1,000 projects.

We’re trying to shift left and Octopus has meant we can let the developers perform deployments, so the number of people involved has been going down steadily since the beginning, but the number of deployments has increased drastically.

Jacob Stetina

DevOps DBA, Skandia

Skandia's CI/CD pipeline

Skandia pipeline
Skandia pipeline

Value

Faster and more frequent automated deployments

With Octopus, Skandia’s complex, manual, 2-day deployments are close to 100% automated. Repeatable and reliable processes let the team deploy over 10,000 times per month, rather than once per quarter. This means they provide more value to stakeholders faster, and almost on-demand. 

We wanted to stop manual deployments and using Octopus we are now almost 100% automated.

Jacob Stetina

DevOps DBA, Skandia

Shifting left and improving developer experience

Skandia’s manual processes needed a 2-day commitment from several team members to ensure a successful deployment. This detracted from other, more valuable tasks. Using Octopus, fewer team members carry out deployments, freeing people to focus on other work. Octopus has also empowered teams to deploy on their own, with guardrails in place to maintain security. These changes have improved the developer experience at Skandia. 

The easier it is for our developers to deploy, the more deployments we have. Our developers really like Octopus Deploy as it makes deployments easier, meaning they can get back to what they enjoy.

Jacob Stetina

DevOps DBA, Skandia

Automating repetitive tasks and day-2 operations

Skandia uses Octopus’s Runbooks feature to automate repetitive tasks. The teams use about 400 runbooks across their projects. This reduces administrative burden by automating tasks like code changes and regression testing. This has freed administrators and team members to work on higher-value projects. 

We see a huge potential in Runbooks because we can alleviate the load on not just administrators but also the team members for repetitive tasks.

Jacob Stetina

DevOps DBA, Skandia

Safe and secure deployments to minimize risk

Security is incredibly important to Skandia. It needed to empower its teams while also making sure there were guardrails to minimize risk. Octopus helps Skandia maintain security with role-based access control (RBAC) across their deployments. Octopus also provides version control, which is critical for allowing the teams to be in charge of updating their deployment processes. The team uses the ServiceNow integration to maintain their change management process from within Octopus and log all changes.

Octopus has allowed us to empower our developers to deploy safely and securely. It ensures we have all the guardrails in place that make it possible for anyone to deploy confidently.

Jacob Stetina

DevOps DBA, Skandia

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