The Story at a Glance
As Delta Faucet expanded into the smart home market, the company required a robust DevOps platform to improve software quality, enhance development productivity, and accelerate time-to-market. Its existing deployment process was slow, manual, and inconsistent, making it difficult to keep pace with market demands.
CleanSlate Technology Group implemented a modern DevOps framework and Azure DevOps tooling, enabling a
utomated environment releases-- reducing deployment time from weeks to minutes, s
tandardized DevOps processes across smart faucet technologies-- improving reliability and release quality, and
Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), ensuring consistency and scalability across development, testing, and production environments.
The result? A scalable, automated DevOps platform that empowers Delta Faucet to accelerate innovation and maintain its leadership in the smart home market.
What Had to Change
Lack of DevOps Processes & Standards
There were no dedicated resources for DevOps and Release Management. With large resource-heavy and custom firmware build environments, each developer struggled with the build process from their local machines, which caused poor quality and inefficient use of time.
Multiple DevOps Tooling & Processes
The smart faucet program had many applications built or acquired without standard DevOps processes. The lack of enterprise standards and automation caused each application to have its own release cycle. The predictability of release management and quality was not consistent.
Not Built to Scale with Business Growth
The smart faucet product had many complexities ranging from managing IoT devices to integration with Alexa and Google voice skills. The initial product was built to meet the time-to-market demands, but it was not built to scale with other smart plumbing platforms.
How CleanSlate Responded
Designed & Built New CI/CD Processes
CleanSlate designed and implemented Azure DevOps tooling to implement a standard CI/CD process to automate software and infrastructure deployments with high quality and repeatability. The process also included custom container instances in Azure with their entire firmware environment. The pipelines made the build process quick and easy to improve quality and developer efficiency.
Automated All Infrastructure Deployments (IaC)
CleanSlate leveraged Terraform to provision and configure all infrastructure in the cloud. This automation enabled research, development, and testing environments to be spun up with minimal support needed from the infrastructure teams. This consistency in environments improved the quality and efficiency of our development team.
Implemented Product-Wide DevOps Standards
Implementing a CI/CD platform provided an easy-to-follow process that took release and production deployment time from weeks to minutes. With standard CI/CD processes and automation, the ability for all product groups to merge the latest code improved the predictability of releases. It ensured a higher quality of production releases.
Standardization of DevOps Improved Scalability
Leveraging Azure DevOps tooling and standard processes across all existing applications and a new Fleet Management System for their IoT hardware allowed the smart faucet to orchestrate, at scale, the management and delivery of firmware updates to their IoT hardware.
What Changed
Delta Faucet’s growth in the smart home market is very strategic to its overall company objectives. The first phase of building highly scalable and reliable technologies for their smart faucets started with building a robust and predictable DevOps platform. Delta needed to improve quality, enhance development productivity, and deploy technology to market faster to meet market demands.
By implementing a new DevOps process and Azure DevOps tooling, CleanSlate enabled:
- Environment releases to market went from weeks and high effort to minutes through automation
- Standard processes across all smart faucet technologies improved reliability and ensured the quality of releases to the ever-changing product demands within the growing market
- Implementation of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) improved consistency and scalability of development, testing, and production environments
Ready to Move Forward?
Start with a structured assessment of your environment, priorities, and constraints. CleanSlate can help turn that into a practical path forward.