For over 18 years C&K Auto Parts has been a high-quality auto parts provider for extended warranty companies, automobile dealer groups, and repair shops throughout the US and Canada.

C&K was dealing with the challenge of overspending on their cloud environment due to paying for resources that weren’t being used. Also, their deployments required a long outage window, had repeated failed deployments, failed rollbacks, and had not been able to successfully deploy for several months. Additional Dev Ops challenges included little branching strategy, discrepancies between source and production code, and had no automation in place.

We were able to address all of their challenges by introducing a new environment, through a cloud usage audit, planning and a full assessment of the future state, and executing consolidation and right-sizing of cloud infrastructure, resulting in a monthly reduction of 60%. Then, our DevOps supported the design of container-based deployment infrastructure (via Kubernetes). We automated builds, deployments, and releases using Azure DevOps, and implemented pull requests with reviews (code life cycle policy). Under all of this, we established code branching strategy. We did a full evaluation of their existing technology staff and provided support in the hiring process (interviewed candidates) to fill positions with strong resources. With our assistance, they were able to hire a less senior resource to lead the IT team and allow that person to grow into the role. We continue to provide a path for escalation as needed.

The measure of success is that they have reduced their annual cloud spending by $60,000. They have a solid, self-sufficient development team, who now only call us for emergencies. Deployments are pre-scheduled and automated with minimal (under 1 minute) downtime, and rollbacks have also been automated.