Acquia Partners With CloudBees to Simplify and Scale DevOps With a Unified and Secure CI/CD Solution

Industry: Information Technology and Digital Experience Platform

Geography: Global

Summary: Acquia, a leader in open digital experience software, partnered with CloudBees to unify over 16 siloed Jenkins instances into a single, secure CI/CD solution, enhancing operational efficiency and enabling faster delivery of digital experiences.

Challenge: Acquia needed to address the inefficiencies and compliance risks of managing multiple disparate Jenkins instances, aiming to create a streamlined, secure, and scalable CI/CD environment.

Solution: Implemented CloudBees to consolidate and standardize CI/CD processes, automating pipelines and ensuring security and compliance across the organization.

Results:

• Significantly reduced development time by using CloudBees’ standardized templates and plugins.

• Improved team productivity and morale by automating routine tasks and focusing on feature development.

• Increased deployment frequency to "hundreds per day" using a GitOps model.

• Enhanced operational efficiency by building a custom CI/CD platform on top of CloudBees, leveraging AWS.

• Met security and compliance requirements through automated processes and centralized management.

• Strengthened infrastructure innovation through a strategic partnership with CloudBees, ensuring continuous support, adaptability, and co-development of solutions tailored to business needs.

Product: CloudBees CI

Since 2007, Acquia has been on a mission to help businesses create seamless, personalized digital experiences for their customers. 

Acquia empowers ambitious digital innovators to craft the most productive, frictionless digital experiences that make a difference to their customers, employees, and communities. With Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP), businesses can unlock the potential of their customer data and content, accelerating time to market and increasing engagement, conversion, and revenue.

Challenge

Before CloudBees, Acquia's CI/CD was a complex and fragmented ecosystem. "We actually had lots of Jenkins, Travis CI, and homegrown tools that we called pipelines that we used internally," explains Stephen Raghunath, Director of Engineering at Acquia, who oversees the building and management of services spanning 30+ engineering teams. While the team appreciated the flexibility of Jenkins, managing 16+ instances proved to be a significant burden. 

Jake Farell, who leads a team responsible for setting and promoting engineering standards across the organization echoed a similar sentiment, describing how the number of Jenkins instances had ballooned over time: "We had probably one or two Jenkins that we operated and ran. Over time we sprawled and then were operating 16+ Jenkins that varied in their setup maturity and the way that they were being hardened or exposed in the ecosystem." This sprawl not only complicated maintenance but also introduced security vulnerabilities and compliance risks.

This decentralized approach created several pain points:

• Maintenance Overload: Engineering teams spent excessive time maintaining, updating, and securing their individual Jenkins instances, diverting resources from core product development.

• Lack of Centralized Expertise: The absence of a unified platform made it difficult to leverage best practices and share knowledge across teams.

• Inconsistent Compliance: Ensuring consistent security and adherence to stringent  Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) requirements across numerous Jenkins instances was a major concern. Jake emphasized the importance of compliance in their decision-making process: "When you start to think of a compliant deployment infrastructure or capabilities, this becomes a critical avenue in the way that you operate and standardize across the board." The team recognized that they needed a solution that could provide a consistent, compliant environment across all their CI/CD processes.

Solution

Acquia needed a partner to centralize its Jenkins CI/CD ecosystem, reduce the burden on its engineering teams, and ensure compliance with evolving regulations. CloudBees emerged as the clear choice. "We wanted a vendor that’ll take some of the responsibility of centralizing our CI/CD ecosystem, maintaining and scaling it," Stephen explains.

One of the most significant transformations Acquia undertook was consolidating its 16+ Jenkins instances into a single, unified system. Previously, each engineering team managed its own Jenkins setup, leading to inconsistencies in plugin usage, security configurations, and maintenance schedules. This lack of standardization created operational bottlenecks and increased compliance risks.

By leveraging CloudBees CI, Acquia centralized Jenkins management, ensuring:

• Uniform plugin updates across all teams, reducing compatibility issues

• A governed CI/CD process that improved security and compliance

• A single platform team responsible for maintaining and scaling the system, reducing the burden on individual engineering teams

This transition not only improved efficiency but also enhanced the developer experience. 

The decision to partner with CloudBees went beyond simply offloading maintenance tasks. Jake underscored the importance of having a partner that could assist with FedRAMP controls: "We didn't want to, again, have to deal with FedRAMP controls by ourselves or have to meet some of these restrictions without guaranteeing that a vendor would step up to make sure that they were supporting that ecosystem." 

CloudBees stood out as a reliable partner that could meet stringent compliance requirements and provide the necessary support.

Acquia wasn't just looking for a product; they were seeking a collaborative partner for the long term. Jake states, "We saw it more as a question of who's going to be in for the journey so that when we do hit a hiccup, we're going to have a collaboration partner next to us. We can both grow together and solve the business need."

Results

The adoption of CloudBees at Acquia has revolutionized engineering processes, leading to significant improvements in efficiency, compliance, and team morale. 

The implementation of CloudBees had a profound impact on Acquia's engineering teams. By streamlining the shipping mechanism, CloudBees enabled the creation of a centralized CI/CD platform, used by numerous teams. Stephen  says that having a centralized platform took care of testing and integrating with their security scanning tools and deployment mechanism to Kubernetes, “it reduced toil for our teams in shipping and managing, even automating tasks like building monitoring dashboards.”

Jake adds that teams previously would spend cycles and ultimately story points working on CI actions that have now been templated. “Not only are we able to have a standard that's followed and adhered to from a compliance perspective, but it gives us time back where we can focus on feature and value add to the business, which is always a benefit."

One of the standout features of CloudBees that particularly appealed to Acquia was its "customizable" approach, which allowed them to build their own internal pipeline platform on top of CloudBees. Leveraging AWS as their cloud infrastructure, Acquia was able to create a custom solution that perfectly aligned with their unique needs and workflows.

Stephen emphasized the flexibility of CloudBees: "We actually built our internal CI/CD platform on top of it. It streamlined our shipping mechanism." This custom platform allowed for deeper integration with Acquia's existing tools and systems, enhancing their overall operational efficiency.

Measuring CloudBees ROI

The ROI of adopting CloudBees is evident in several key areas:

• Reduced Development Time: The standardized processes and readily available, vetted plugins provided by CloudBees have significantly reduced development time. Teams can now rely on a consistent set of tools and frameworks, allowing them to focus on innovation rather than reinventing the wheel.

• Significant Savings in Human Hours: One of the most significant benefits has been the savings in human hours related to compliance and security. This has allowed Acquia to redirect resources towards more strategic initiatives.

• Improved Deployment Frequency: The efficiency gains from CloudBees have enabled Acquia to significantly increase its deployment frequency, pushing out "hundreds per day" using a GitOps model with rolling deployments.

CloudBees as a Crucial Part of Future Plans

Looking ahead, Acquia sees CloudBees as a crucial component of its future engineering strategy. They aim to onboard more teams onto the CloudBees platform and integrate it into any future acquisitions. "We know how powerful the CloudBees software is,” says Stephen, “and when we look into other capabilities that we might bring into our portfolio, one of the first questions we ask ourselves is, ‘How do we get them onto CloudBees?’"

This commitment to expanding the use of CloudBees reflects Acquia's confidence in the platform's ability to drive efficiency, compliance, and innovation across the organization.

Ultimately, the greatest benefit Acquia cites from its experience with CloudBees is the partnership itself. Jake summed it up perfectly: "Technology changes over time, but having a partner that is willing to listen, help us, and ensure that together we're to move the needle is really the key."

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