Vaisala’s R&D is a hub for innovation that consists of a very diverse set of projects, teams, and professionals: from low-level embedded developers to research scientists, from platform developers to cloud architects and test engineers. To support their work, Vaisala established the DevOps Team, with a mission to develop and modernize the common software development infrastructure, enabling the teams to focus on their actual product development and research work. Omoroi’s DevOps Lead Consultant joined the freshly founded team to strengthen the vision and execution. Being pleased with the results, one year later Vaisala added another Omoroi DevOps Lead Consultant to the team to focus especially on cloud services.
The DevOps team took on the challenge of modernizing the development, maintenance, and support of a diverse set of tools used by the R&D teams. The goals were to improve the developer experience and efficiency and to modernize the software development practices at Vaisala overall. This included driving wider adoption of cloud services.
The DevOps team took official ownership of the tools and the infrastructure. Clear contact channels were founded for support. The team defined a standard DevOps toolset and a strategy to consolidate the portfolio. They designed and implemented a unified and clear user management scheme for the supported services. The maintenance process of the tools was improved and made more transparent. To upkeep their efficiency, the DevOps team consistently increased the level of automation in everything at hand. The team created a hybrid pipeline model that allowed seamless integration of the on-premises and cloud services to support further adaptation of advanced cloud and SaaS services in CI.
One key aspect of the work was to keep close relationships with the R&D teams to both fully understand their needs and also to share knowledge of the best practices in CI and tool usage. Furthermore, the usage of the DevOps services was clarified by policies and automatic monitoring. Migrations from old to new services were carefully planned and communicated with the focus on minimizing disturbances to teams’ daily work.
The DevOps team received good feedback from the teams and other stakeholders. In a reasonably short timeframe, they managed to improve the stability of services, shorten the upgrade cycles of the services, and phase out old services. The teams can now use less time setting up the tools and environments and concentrate on their actual mission. We can say that the goal of modernizing the software development tools and processes at Vaisala was fulfilled.