Irish bookmaker Paddy Power claims it has reduced the time required to upgrade its applications due to the rollout of open source, cloud automation tools.
According to the Computerworlduk.com website, Paddy Power rolled out its Opscode’s Chef automation tools in March of this year as part of a move to simplify configuration and deployment of server resources from its data centres running on a CloudStack platform.
The bookmaker said that this had helped to reduce the time needed to build, text and deploy applications.
John Turner, Paddy Power’s software development manager, said that while this process previously took days to complete, the new process can tackle it in a “matter of minutes”.
“For one of our back office systems we can provision an entire environment in ten minutes. This allows us to more efficient in the way that we use infrastructure,” he added.
“Our release cycles in 2010 were described in months, and towards the end of 2012 these were talked about in weeks. Now we have the capability of releasing in hours.”
Turner also said that the reduced amount of manual intervention had shortened turnaround and cycle times of software releases, allowing the firm to focus more on the development process.
“[Chef] gives us the opportunity to iterate faster and therefore to innovate faster,” he added. “So where a competitor is innovating in a certain area and has stolen a march, it allows us to react to that much quicker than we have in the past.
“As we observe that marketplace becoming more dynamic, and our competitors gain an increased ability to react, we also need to make sure that we have the same or better capability as well.”
source : www.igamingbusiness.com
