Transforming to a fully automated modern development experience platform

The Challenge

Reduce complexity and increase the efficiency of large scale cloud native development teams

Okteto’s client is a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest insurance providers. Their digital platform has services distributed across multiple regions globally. The geographical distribution of services added complexity to microservice development along with the inconsistency in development practices across teams compounded into productivity and velocity issues for the organization. Onboarding new team members was another significant challenge, often taking weeks to set up their development environments.

The Platform team set out to streamline development workflows, manage technical debt, and ensure uniformity and self-service availability between development and production environments.

The Solution

Okteto Automation Platform for Development Optimization

Okteto was evaluated and chosen to address these challenges. The ready-to-use platform gave the team an easy path to unifying and automating production-like development environments, and greatly reduced potential issues caused by developers testing directly in production environments. This ensured that apps and code developed in one environment would work seamlessly in the other.

The Results

Dev Productivity Gains and Reduced Technical Debt

Okteto helped transform this financial company’s development processes, leading to significant positive impacts:

• Increased Developer Productivity: With a controlled and automated approach, Okteto streamlined development workflows, reducing time spent on environment setup and configuration. This faster inner-loop has resulted in an estimated ROI of upwards of $400,000 annually.
• Improved Deployment Confidence: With improved testing capabilities and a unified prod-like development environment, developers can now deploy changes rapidly and with confidence.
• Technical Debt Reduction: The platform team’s meticulous analysis and optimization efforts, aided by Okteto, led to a reduction in technical debt, resulting in more stable and maintainable systems.
• Positive Team Feedback: Teams that adopted Okteto reported overwhelmingly positive feedback. Developers appreciated the improved development experience and the ability to work more efficiently.
• Future Goals: The subsidiary company plans to have all 200 developers within their organization utilizing Okteto by the end of the year, demonstrating their confidence in Okteto's capabilities.

Conclusion

Okteto's Role in Platform Success

Okteto played a pivotal role in the organization’s transformation, addressing key challenges and enabling teams to align their development environments with the rest of the platform. By providing developers with self-service, trusted tools and practices that improved their development experience, resistance to change was minimized, and developers could easily see the tangible benefits of Okteto in their daily work. Adoption of Okteto has been rapid.

Okteto's capabilities contributed to performance optimization efforts and helped facilitate innovative solutions for the Platform Team. Once environment automation was implemented, they rolled out a tiered service catalog and scoring system, allowing the org to prioritize their development efforts more effectively.

The organization plans to continue evangelizing modern environments, conducting demos, workshops, and engaging with teams to showcase how a modern DevX brings joy to developers. This proactive approach ensures that teams across the organization are well-informed and fully utilize the platform's potential.

How you can get started modernizing DevX

This insurance company’s success story with Okteto demonstrates the transformative power unlocked by automation and unifying environments across the lifecycle. If you're facing similar challenges with your development workflows, it's time re-think your environment strategy and align your platform. Consider Okteto a collaborative partner in your cloud native journey.

Learn more about how Okteto's platform and Development-Experience-First approach can benefit your organization, and become our next success story. Contact us today.