Boats Group (Boats Group), the division of Dominion Enterprises that operates YachtWorld.com, BoatTrader.com and boats.com, is pleased to announce a new partnership with continuous integration (CI) platform provider CloudBees, using its DEV@cloud system to ensure Boats Group continues to lead the way with the latest engineering practices in the industry.
Boats Group’s websites serve more than 38 million unique visitors annually in six languages for customers in 106 countries. Its team of developers face a constant challenge to ensure consistency across projects and keep infrastructure maintenance overheads to a minimum, so they took the decision to move away from hosting and maintaining their own CI infrastructure and using the CloudBees hosted solution instead.
The DEV@cloud system enables Boats Group to move Java development to the cloud, and provides support for building .NET components used on Boats Group’s platform, also enabling Boats Group to continue hosting its own quality assurance (QA) and production environments.
As a result of implementing the new system, project startup times have been significantly shortened, with Boats Group’s developers now able to get new projects off the ground far more quickly and simply. Maintenance overheads have also been reduced, with a drop in stuck builds and other issues meaning less downtime and higher productivity.
Boats Group’s engineering manager Mike Marich comments: “We develop numerous small services that each provides a well-defined function or feature for the overall system. As a result, we need to spin up new projects quickly and often. DEV@cloud enables our developers to rapidly set up new projects and concentrate on development, not the build infrastructure. With CloudBees, we can continuously run tests to see the moment something breaks, and release to production with a single button click, meaning we spend much less time dealing with build issues and more time doing the actual development, which is the core of our business.”
Mike Lambert, CloudBees vice president of sales – Americas, added: “We’re delighted to be working with Boats Group and giving their development team the tools to operate even more effectively. With CloudBees helping streamline project startups and minimize infrastructure maintenance, Boats Group can focus on doing what they’re good at.”
