.svg)
Through collaboration and innovation, Launch transformed its client’s development ecosystem by unifying the organization’s technology platform, migrating 20k services to the cloud, and designing the developer experience across its global footprint.
Faced with a labyrinth of tools, fragmented workflows, and shifting priorities, a global leader in travel technology set out to transform its developer ecosystem — one that could unlock innovation across its vast network of teams.
The client aimed to create a centralized platform through an Internal API Store project so they could provide a single point of computation, ensuring alignment and consistency among tools and applications developed internally. This initiative sought to enhance developer collaboration, streamline workflows, and foster integration across teams.
Ultimately, they wanted to enable a unified and efficient development ecosystem within their organization.
Tech Stack
DevOps, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, CI/CD pipelines, GitHub, Jenkins, Backstage, and NodeJS Express
Industry
Travel Technology
Services
Our client uses its platform to connect travelers with a wide range of travel experiences, helping them navigate millions of options to find the best trips. It also supports travel partners in optimizing their offerings on both a local and global scale.
The Challenge: Breaking Silos and Navigating Strategic Shifts
Over the past few years, the client’s growth through acquisitions introduced operational silos, hindering collaboration and resource-sharing across teams. Frequent shifts in their IT strategy compounded these challenges, disrupting long-term planning and leaving teams reliant on fragmented tools and methodologies.
Ultimately, the goal was to build a developer ecosystem capable of scaling alongside the company’s growth, empowering teams to deliver exceptional experiences to millions of customers worldwide. This vision served as the North Star, guiding the complex and ambitious transformation required to achieve it.
At its core, the Internal API Store was designed to be more than just a repository of tools. It was envisioned as the foundation for a unified developer experience—a single point of computation where teams could align their workflows, integrate with ease, and innovate without the burden of operational inefficiencies. Together, we aimed to tackle these critical pain points head-on, ensuring consistency and alignment across internally developed tools and applications.
By breaking down organizational silos and standardizing processes, the client sought to overcome five key challenges:
Frequent Strategic Shifts:
Over the past two years, the client’s IT direction has changed at least three times due to turnover and shifting priorities at the C-suite level. This created instability and difficulty in setting long-term IT strategies.
Organizational Silos:
With multiple acquisitions under its belt, the company found itself with a patchwork of teams, each operating with its own tools and processes—creating inefficiencies that hampered collaboration and innovation. This siloed approach hindered collaboration, resource sharing, and alignment across the organization.
Standardization of Cloud Operations and Stacks:
With disparate teams using varying technologies and methodologies, finding a unified standard for cloud operations and technology stacks became essential to improving efficiency, reducing redundancies, and enhancing scalability.
AI and Emerging Technologies:
Adapting to advancements in AI presented challenges in terms of skill development, deployment of AI-driven solutions, and fostering an innovative mindset across teams. The organization also needed to address gaps in AI-related documentation, processes, and tools to leverage its potential effectively.
Knowledge Management and Accessibility:
Existing repositories, documentation, and technical resources were fragmented and inconsistent, leading to inefficiencies and duplicated efforts. Enhancing these elements was crucial to creating a seamless experience for developers and teams to access and utilize shared knowledge effectively.
Our Solution: Building Bridges with Agile Innovation
Our approach was based on aligning with the client’s established delivery framework while driving significant process improvements. By working within the existing sprint-based delivery cycles, we ensured that our contributions integrated smoothly into their Agile workflows. This alignment minimized disruptions and allowed us to deliver value without impacting ongoing operations.
We deployed a team of nine engineers with expertise in DevOps, support, and software development. This team offered tiered support and development services, addressing critical technical and operational gaps.
Our engineers led initiatives to enhance CI/CD processes,optimize cloud operations, and standardize tools across diverse teams. Toaddress fragmented workflows, our engineers implemented a Feature BranchDeployment solution using GitHub Workflows and Spinnaker, enabling contributorsto test changes in isolated environments without full-stack deployment. Thisautomated process cut deployment setup times from hours to minutes. Thissolution improved collaboration, reduced conflicts, and ensured better integrationacross teams.
Additionally, our senior engineers have worked on various software development projects, leveraging tools like Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, and Backstage, to align the client’s internal tools and platforms with their evolving IT strategy.
What made this project particularly unique was the proactive deployment of initiatives like Feature Branch Deployment. While adhering to the client’s current priorities, we found opportunities to optimize processes and address underlying inefficiencies. This initiative reduced setup times for testing environments from several hours to just minutes, enhancing productivity and improving developer workflows.
This seamless integration into the client’s workflow allowed our developers to optimize these various projects in the ways that brought the most value to the client.
The Results: Unlocked Developer Potential and Scalability
This transformation lays the foundation for a seamless, future-ready developer ecosystem that fosters collaboration and drives innovation at scale.
By reducing deployment times and fostering a unified development environment, the client’s developers now spend less time on operational bottlenecks and more time on innovation. These improvements are expected to drive long-term efficiency gains across teams.
Measurable Impact
Our work has led to significant efficiency gains, both for our internal team and external contributors.
Internal Team Improvements:
- Deployment Time Reduction: Previously, it took 4 hours to manually deploy the entire stack to test a Frontend (FE) Feature Branch. Now, only the FE needs deployment, and the process is fully automated, saving valuable time.
- Faster PR Reviews: Each pull request (PR) review used to require 1 hour since changes had to be manually set up locally. Now, with easy access to Feature Branches, reviews are much more efficient.
External Team Benefits:
- Faster Testing &Contributions: On average, it used to take 3 hours for external teams to test their contributions in the dev/test environment. Now, depending on approvals, PRs can be merged immediately or may require some wait time.
- PR Merge Time: While the average PR merge time across all cases is 20 hours (including our own PRs, which take longer due to review cycles), external contributions benefit from a faster approval process when everything is in order.
Long-Term Impact:
- Increased Developer Productivity: By removing manual setup steps, both internal and external teams can focus on development rather than troubleshooting deployments.
- Improved Collaboration: External teams can contribute more easily, leading to amore streamlined development process.
- Reduction in Operational Overhead: With automation handling deployments, there’s a measurable decrease in redundant effort and time spent on setup and testing.
Ultimately, our work together resulted in faster feature development, higher adoption of processes, and a more efficient workflow for everyone involved.
If your organization is seeking to transform its developer experience, too, reach out to one of our Navigators through the link below to learn exactly how we can help you unlock an enhanced future state.