Company summary
Founded in 1966, Bluegreen Vacations, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hilton Grand Vacations, provides vacation ownership opportunities to enable busy families to slow down, relax, and share their time together. With more than 4,500 professionals and associates, Bluegreen is not only committed to providing the best vacation experiences possible, but also to leaving a positive impact on the communities through advocacy and action.
The Challenge
Seeking a solution to eliminate costly manual labor in the DevOps pipeline
Bluegreen Vacations had an enterprise-size platform connecting over 212,000 owners with 67 clubs and resorts, and access to more than 11,000 other hotels through partnerships and exchange networks.
Bluegreen’s technology team had several technical team members manually deploying applications, and it was their goal to automate this process to increase performance and lower costs. Bluegreen sought lifecycle management automation, which it hoped would not only save costs but also enable its talented team to put efforts into Bluegreen’s core business rather than infrastructure and software deployment.
So an internal team was tasked with lifecycle management automating the management of their infrastructure and software deployment lifecycle to eliminate manual labor. However, the solution the team deployed in VMware and AWS, Orca, was focused narrowly on configuration management, and it was a tedious task to manually deploy new machines, software, and software updates to AWS or VMware. Further, it turned out that the new solution was not flexible to address the infrastructure aspect of Bluegreen’s lifecycle management requirements.
The Solution
Automating lifecycle management for DevOps and infrastructure teams
Upon meeting CloudHesive at an AWS User Groups of Florida event, Bluegreen decided to engage with CloudHesive to find an automation solution that could deliver the efficiency it sought.
To address Bluegreen’s need for software lifecycle management, CloudHesive revamped the DevOps lifecycle using a new set of tools. The new approach included best practices for traditional deployment on AWS and VMware using CloudHesive’s standard suite of solutions, including the multi-tenant deployment tool, Octopus, and Jenkins, an open-source automation server to enable software building, testing, and deployment. CloudHesive worked with Bluegreen to establish the tools in the Bluegreen environment, provide embedded licensing for the tools, and support Bluegreen’s first deployment on the new system.
To address Bluegreen’s need for infrastructure lifecycle management, CloudHesive deployed the Octopus and Jenkins solution in three stages. First, it applied best practices to the application infrastructure architecture, including load balancing, using multi-availability-zone (AZ) application servers, and deploying with an active/passive failover database.
Next, CloudHesive built a pipeline to take base images, customize them to established standards, deploy them to either VMware or AWS, and perform the operating system and dependent software installation and configuration. Finally, CloudHesive created a deployment solution for Bluegreen’s non-customized software, extendable to their custom software.
The benefits
Saving 40 person hours a month with lifecycle management solutions
These new DevOps deployment lifecycle management solutions enabled Bluegreen to bundle all tasks into an automated framework, saving employee effort and removing the human error element to the tasks. The solution eliminated manual labor in the software development pipeline and infrastructure lifecycle management. Bluegreen reports the solution now saves the team around 40 hours a month.
Services that drive success
Devops
- Built a pipeline to customize base images and deploy them to either VMware or AWS
- Integrate with multi-tenant deployment tool Octopus
- Integrate with Jenkins for software building, testing, and deployment
Customer benefit summary
- DevOps lifecycle automation saves 40 person hours per month
- Infrastructure lifecycle management increased overall efficiency
AWS Technologies used
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
Third-party technologies used
- Packer
- Terraform
- Ansible
- Jenkins
- Octopus
- Windows
- .Net
- GitHub
- Azure DevOps Server
Industry
Travel and hospitality
Segment
Private
Region
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