All case studies / The Lottery Corporation
The Lottery Corporation reduced deployment time from 90 minutes to 10 minutes with Octopus
About The Lottery Corporation
The Lottery Corporation (TLC) is the driving force behind Australia’s largest lottery games and one of the best-performing lottery businesses in the world. Its business dates back to 1881 when George Adams organized the first Tattersalls public sweep on the Sydney Cup. It now operates in every Australian state and territory except Western Australia. TLC’s games deliver life-changing wins to customers and make a meaningful difference in the community.
TLC’s brands include The Lott and Keno. It has more than 3,800 lottery outlets and 3,400 Keno venues in Australia, with digital distribution through apps and online platforms. This makes it one of the largest retail operations in the country.
Challenges
TLC’s manual deployments were lengthy and risky
Before using Octopus, TLC ran manual releases across around 120 servers. Each release was risky and brought with it several unknowns. The team found it difficult to track which servers they’d deployed to, which caused outages and performance degradation. They also had inconsistencies between their test and production environments, which meant unexpected issues occurred when they pushed a release to production. Each environment had different variables, and keeping track of them manually caused more unexpected changes.
As a result, deployments often had to occur in the early morning and could take up to 2 hours. Each deployment also required a 3-hour downtime window. TLC also operates in a highly regulated industry where they must submit releases to third-party regulators, and keeping track of their manual deployments became increasingly difficult.
TLC wanted to automate its processes to reduce deployment time and risks. The team wanted to reduce the possibility of outages while making it easier to manage their regulatory requirements.
Solution
TLC used Octopus to speed up deployments and increase business confidence
TLC was an early adopter of Octopus Deploy, choosing Octopus because of the consistency it could bring to deployments. Now, Octopus orchestrates all deployments across the business. Using Octopus, teams have automated their manual deployments, ensuring that their testing and production environments are consistent.
Using Octopus, deployments never get missed, as everything is automated, and teams can see what environment they’re deploying to. They have confidence in deployments and no longer consider release time a risk. It’s now very unexpected to have a release cause an outage due to a poor deployment. Mitigating this risk is crucial, as TLC has to report downtime to regulatory bodies and can face fines or license restrictions.
TLC’s teams use several Octopus features to help automate their deployments. Octopus's variables make it easy to store and scope values that need to change. Teams can see their variables at a glance and ensure they’re matched to the right environments. They also use environment promotion to manage their deployments across many test and production environments. Teams in less regulated business areas also use tenanted deployments. This lets them deploy their full deployment stack to their production environments in a single click. While they can’t use some features in more regulated areas of the business, they appreciate that Octopus lets them manage multiple use cases in one tool.
Octopus enables us to deploy up to 5 times a day in some areas of our business, which was too risky with our manual deployments. If it wasn’t for Octopus, we just couldn’t do it.
The Lottery Corporation’s CI/CD pipeline
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Value
Deployment time reduced from 90 minutes to 10 minutes
Before using Octopus, TLC’s manual deployments took anywhere from 1.5 to 2 hours and required a 3-hour outage window to help manage the risk. Now, TLC’s automated deployments take roughly 10 minutes to complete. Teams have also moved from running one deployment at a time to conducting rolling deployments. This means they ship changes sooner and more frequently. In some areas of the business, they deploy up to 5 times daily.
Going from deployments taking 1.5 hours to 10 minutes has allowed us to increase our deployments 10-fold. The amount of time we save on each deployment is immeasurable.
Easily managing compliance in a strict regulatory environment
TLC operates in a highly regulated industry with strict deployment requirements. This was difficult to manage with manual deployments, but teams have found this much easier with Octopus. They must have a separation of duties and are heavily audited, especially regarding access to production. They use role-based access controls (RBAC) in Octopus to manage these requirements, ensuring only certain people can deploy to production. Built-in audit logs also make it easy to access and provide key details about their operations.
Before Octopus, we had to conduct manual audits, and it was a ‘trust me’ system as we didn’t have logs. It used to be so painful, but having auditability built-in with Octopus is a lifesaver, and has been invaluable.
Increased business confidence to roll out changes even in peak times
Before Octopus, TLC’s deployments were risky, and so the business often worried about something going wrong. Teams had to account for a day or two of downtime with large, manual releases. With Octopus, systems no longer have to shut down for deployments, and they no longer need downtime windows. Deployments aren’t considered a risk, and it’s rare for a release to cause an outage. The business now has so much confidence in releases, that teams can deploy changes during heightened events like jackpots, where changes previously had to be locked down. This means teams can deploy more frequently, providing more value to the business and its customers.
The business always expected downtime for a day or two with our large, manual releases. Now, deployments are so solid that we can do releases all the time, even in heightened events where we used to have to lock down changes. The business has full confidence that they are safe.
Increased productivity and developer experience
Before using Octopus, processes were manual, and only the most technical team members could conduct deployments, making onboarding difficult. With Octopus, TLC has a simple interface for a very complex process, making onboarding new team members easy. They can quickly learn how to deploy, empowering them to control their workload. Deployments are faster and less stressful, reducing the impact on the team. It also means that teams once dedicated to manual deployments can now focus on shipping new features.
Having not worked with Octopus before, I would struggle now without it. It’s solved so many problems as we have a tool behind us that enables us. It is invaluable to us as a company.