Kieron Sambrook-Smith, Chief Commercial Officer at Platform.sh spoke at eZ Conference 2017 in London about the business value of Platform as a Service (PaaS) Automation. He covers the many aspects of the advantages of using a PaaS. The business value you can expect to reap will range from hosting cost savings, better workflow and team productivity, new project delivery concepts, and greater competitive advantage. Discover a more advanced implementation of your service offering.

1. The Business Value of PaaS Automation
eZ Systems Conference, 6th June 2017
Kieron Sambrook-Smith, Chief Commercial Officer, Platform.sh
Email: Kieron.Sambrook-smith@platform.sh
Phone: +44(0)7818 427136
Skype: KieronSS

2. Our background and how we arrived at the PaaS
Who are we ?

3. What
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud based hosting - “Hi Control aPaaS”
NoOps + cloning means Continuous Delivery
High Availability - All the time
Improvements & ROI are breathtaking (cost reduction, productivity &
performance)
Why
Drupal Commerce deployed across 100,000 sites
300 projects delivered
All had the same web based project delivery problems
What do we do
and why ?

4. Customers & Partners
350 enterprise clients running live services in our dedicated triple redundant 99.99% offering
85% are eCommerce
350 enterprise clients and 2,000 self-service clients running projects on our LXC container based service
11 regions around the globe on AWS, Azure and Orange Business Services
OEM Cloud contracts
Java CMS….

5. Subscriptions from
$10 to $100k per month
Global 24/7/365 support
(Stack support & Drupal Application support)
Customers in 116+ countries
Comprehensive Offering Since Q3 2014
Pricing & support coverage

6. Process improvement & acceleration
What is
automation ?

7. Three Types of Work
Business process point of view
Planned work, Changes & Unplanned work
We want to reduce Unplanned work, and makes other work quick & repeatable
Development Operations Live Service
Agile development
Testing
UAT
Systems &
environments
Servers & hosting
Security of data
Marketing
Services
eCommerce sales
Support
PLANNED WORK
CHANGES
UNPLANNED WORK

8. Process improvement – we’ve been here before !
• Lean, Kaizen, Continuous Improvement and Just-in-Time were regime changing principles in the 1970’s.
• Back then, technology was a side-show. Nowadays it’s the only show.
• IT is at the heart of what we do. Improving processes between the developer and live – DevOps - is highly valuable.
• There are many supporting technologies that strive to improve processes in this space.
• We concentrate on the difficult block of DevOps processes that map applications to infrastructure.
All work is a process
So lets look at how it all fits together as a system, and make it all work better.

9. All the processes that exist between the developer and the live system - development to operations,
or DevOps - are significant to the customer experience.
Therefore better DevOps impacts the live service in many positive ways = competitive advantage.
“DevOps are defined as a set of principles and process management practices that aim to
make software building, testing & release management fast and reliable”
Operations value
Automating the entire DevOps process block…..
Development Operations Live Service

10. And the difference between the High Performers and Low Performers is huge !
Strong relationship between good DevOps and competitive edge
2016 State of DevOps Report – research from 3,200 professionals to see what level of DevOps they had implemented
46x 440x
96x5x

11. ROI of Better DevOps
Much more efficient throughput + much shorter elapsed times = regime change !
Efficiencies streamline business process and collapses time to deliver
Support
440 x faster feature
concept to live
46 x more
code deployments
22% less unplanned work
50% less time remediating security issues
5x less failed
deployments
96x faster MTTR = less time
application down
Development Operations Live Service

12. • Many different productivity tools, provided by hosting infrastructure vendors (IaaS) and independents
• Difficult to tie them all together and track the
constantly changing environment
• Doing DevOps well is important, but doing it yourself
is like building a house on shifting sands
Automation - Doing it yourself ?
….is difficult, expensive and a long term commitment.

13. Critical aspects of automation that are rarely included within scripts
The process of logging in and executing a series of commands in a compliant manner involves:
Doing this for hundreds of scripts, plus long term maintenance, key individuals moving on not having properly
documented it all, AND the constantly changing environment are the usual factors for things continually going wrong.
The problem with DevOps regimes that “pretend” to automate already
Often times it’s all smoke and mirrors.
1. Authentication and authorisation.
2. Knowledge of passwords.
3. Automatic backup & change management.
4. Command syntax knowledge specific to the stack, hardware, toolset versions etc.
5. Parameter validation and logic to handle errors and conditions.
6. Logging and audit.

14. Their Use Case isn’t just your Use Case, it’s everybody else’s Use Case
They probably know a lot more about this set of problems than you do.
Remember, we originally launched our PaaS to solve the problems we kept seeing on those 350 projects.
We have all seen a lot more since then, in a lot more detail, and we’re solving them all (mostly).
And we’re supporting all the versions of all the stack components and services you’re interested in.
Buy automation from the experts
It’s better for everybody in the long run

15. The difference between Managed Hosting & a PaaS
Application lifecycle management

16. Automation & consistency that just allows code to run
Clone live running services & web-sites in seconds
Good for production, great for development
Repeatability inspires confidence to change everything
High availability (HA) & performance
Containers and triple redundancy
Stack is engineered for performance and highly suited to mission critical
Throw any priority of change into production and not worry about bugs or performance degradation
We let code run
“Develop, Deploy, Rinse and Repeat”, Damien Tournaud, CTO Platform.sh

17. 1. Fast onboarding for developers, contractors & 3rd parties
2. Developing & test every feature in a copy of live – for PHP, Drupal, Symfony, Ruby, Python, Node.js…Java
3. See how it deploys, and then how it works
4. Automated testing in the background
5. No more tickets and no more waiting to get things, or to change things
Development workflow
It’s everything we’ve ever wanted. We just didn’t know it until now…..
Development Operations Live Service
Support

18. Data Driven Hosting Decisions - Metrics
Platform.sh automates a big complicated block of DevOps processes - so you don’t have to!
10 metrics we collect from established Case Study customers

19. ROI of Platform.sh
The automation of DevOps processes has enabled much better development workflow
Efficiencies streamline business process and collapses time to deliver
Does this slide reflect Platform.sh benefits on top of better DevOps ?
Development Operations Live Service
Support
20-40% more
productivity
20%
quicker
NoOps = 100% productivity
gain
90% less tickets
= less waiting
Fewer bad deployments, quicker TTFB
Fewer outages &
better performance

20. “I’d say overall developer productivity has improved about 20% ”
“We’re now saving the time and effort of 4-5 full-time technical staff (£300,000 p.a.) to do what the developer can do now at the
touch of a button.”
“Code review, functional approval and UAT between the 10 strong distributed team, design agency and management improved
dramatically overnight”
“The entire UAT problem has gone away now, I’d say the whole process is about 7 times faster.”
“We issue 80% fewer tickets than we used to, and most of those are knowledge sharing opposed to issues.”
“Our deployment cycle used to be twice a month, and only during low traffic. We now release daily, whatever the site is doing!”
“Coding accuracy and design velocity improved by over 20%. Downtime has been virtually eliminated…..”
What customers say
Reiss, TES Global, Studio Aqua

21. “Perfect consistency between environments allows us to deploy to live at any-time without worrying about errors, I
don’t think we’ve ever had an issue with the production service.”
“We don’t need DevOps anymore, nor do we have to wait hours or days for the vendor to respond to our tickets”
“Tickets in QA have disappeared”
“We no longer pay for massive permanent resource allocations to meet unknown future peak traffic, because we
know we can rely on a robust stack which scales seamlessly in minutes when needed.”
“Platform.sh scaled us up and performance was great right through the peak 5,000 concurrent users.”
“We upsized to a PE96 during the summer sale and performance was phenomenal. The old architecture needed way
more hardware during this period and it still used to fall over”
What customers say
British Council, Canadian Football League (CFL), Reiss

22. Thank-you.
Email: Kieron.Sambrook-smith@platform.sh
Phone: +44(0)7818 427136
Skype: KieronSS