How Purplle scaled Platform Engineering and achieved 100% Developer Autonomy with Facets Cloud

India’s leading eCommerce beauty brand streamlined infrastructure management and reduced non-production cloud costs by 70% using Facets.

Strategic Value Delivered by Facets

Before

1. A rapid growth of the development team from 20 to 120 engineers and introduction of new microservices increased the complexity of operations

2. Traditional people-dependent DevOps caused delays in adopting cloud best practices leading to cloud wastage

3. Tribal knowledge in DevOps caused bottlenecks in deployments which slowed down the feature rollouts

After

1. Self-service infrastructure management empowered developers to control their own environments.

2. Pre-baked reusable automation with standardized configurations accelerated towards a well-architected cloud posture with reduced costs and improved efficiency.

3. Aligned autonomy for developers accelerated deployments and improved collaboration between dev and platform teams.

Challenges Faced by Purplle

1. DevOps bottlenecks slowing down developers:

   • Despite moving to microservices and Kubernetes for agility, DevOps operations were reliant on tribal knowledge
   • Growing team of engineers (from 20 to 120 during pandemic) faced delays in getting features to production
   • New features were ready, but DevOps inefficiencies kept them from going live

2. DevOps Bottlenecks affecting cloud posture:

   • DevOps team had to scale to meet developer demands
   • Needed to catch up to best practices around cost, security, and compliance
   • Hiring more engineers wasn't solving underlying process issues

3. Failed Automation Attempts:

   • Previous attempts at automating infrastructure management failed
   • Vendor solutions and manual scripts in Ansible and Terraform only created more assets with tribal knowledge
   • Solutions were not scalable

Why Purplle chose Facets?

After hearing a recommendation from a peer CTO, Purplle evaluated Facets as a Platform Engineering solution. During the trial, Facets showcased its ability to empower both Dev and Ops teams, aligning with Purplle’s tools, security needs, and collaboration goals. It provided a unified platform to manage infrastructure efficiently and eliminated dependencies on individual team members.

How Facets Transformed Purplle's DevOps

1. Rapid Migration: Within a month, fully migrated infrastructure to Facets, including development, sandbox, and production environments

2. Self-Service Infrastructure:

   • Empowered teams with self-serve environment management
   • Developers could manage their own sandboxes
   • Could test features and ensure quality before going live

3. Cost Optimization:

   • Out-of-the-box automation and configurations
   • Reduced non-production cloud costs by 70% through spot management

4. Streamlined Collaboration:

   • Established framework for aligned autonomy
   • Teams empowered to manage software lifecycle
   • Maintained alignment with organizational guardrails

Key Results

1. 100% Developer Autonomy: Empowered developers with self-service infrastructure, accelerating deployments and reducing dependency on DevOps

2. 70% Reduction in Non-Production Cloud Costs: Optimized cloud usage through automated spot management and standardized configurations.

3. 10x Complexity Management: Seamlessly handled increased operational complexity with growing microservices and teams.

4. 50% Faster Feature Rollouts: Removed DevOps bottlenecks, enabling quicker time-to-market for new features.

5. One-Month Infrastructure Migration: Successfully migrated all environments—development, sandbox, and production—to Facets in just four weeks.

What's next for Purplle

Transforming DevOps team into a Platform Engineering team, focusing on:

• Increasing machine throughput
• Optimizing applications
• Unlocking new levels of scalability and innovation

The CTO summarized their vision: "I don't want any DevOps team, I want a platform engineering team who can solve complex problems and help dev teams to scale their apps."

“I don’t want any DevOps team, I want a platform engineering team who can solve complex problems and help dev teams to scale their apps. Like how do you increase the throughput of your machines? Facets will allow us for sure to spend time on high-value activities and not mundane Ops, which is a big unlock for me.” -Suyash Katyayani, Co-Founder & CTO, Purplle

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