Client
Microsoft-one of the biggest computer software and consumer electronics company in the world. Microsoft Power BI Desktop is a desktop application for data modelling, analysis, and visualization. With this app, users can collect data from different data sources and present data in multiple formats. Akvelon contributed to Microsoft’s Power BI Platform and data visualizations and has become an essential part of the Microsoft Power BI Desktop and Windows Store apps release cycle. Akvelon was selected for our expertise in software testing, solid delivery reputation, and cost effectiveness.
Business Need
Microsoft, one of the leading software companies in the world, has implemented Power BI as a universal solution for data visualization with an ability to be extended by Custom Visuals developed by third party developers and companies. Power BI provides cloud-based BI services, known as “Power BI Services”, along with a desktop based interface, called “Power BI Desktop”. Power BI Custom Visuals are widespread in Power BI and they are used by major companies such as Adobe, Intel, etc.
Microsoft needed overall infrastructure support of Power BI product to keep build system up and running and a reliable partner to run engineering services infrastructure that thousands of Microsoft engineers world-wide use on daily basis to build new PowerBI Platform features and roll out features to Microsoft customers.
Solution
Akvelon quickly jumped to take over DevOps and provide 24×7 operations support for the engineering infrastructure. While keeping all managed service KPIs in green, Akvelon focused on growing team efficiencies that helped to provide additional business value to Microsoft.
Akvelon team introduced 24/7 support – maintaining environment, issuing VMs for Power BI developers and solving infrastructure problems. This support includes:
- Maintaining environment, issuing VMs for Power BI developers and solving all kinds of infrastructure problems.
- Monitoring check-ins and gates, digging into reasons of build breaks and resolving them when found.
- Automating routine tasks via new runbooks and improving/updating existing ones.
- Configuring Monitoring System to produce and send adequate and timely alerts about problems or potential problems (e.g. lack of VM free disk space) to the team.
- Creation of a dashboard displaying vital infrastructure metrics such as cache utilization
- Communication with test-owners when broken tests block the build system.
- Constant Knowledge Base update.
- Team internal tracking of releases failures to monitor build versions which are needed for deployments.
- Automated creation of handoff reports, decreasing the time spent on handoff
Benefits and Results
Akvelon team provide stable support of existing pipelines, Fas Acknowledge and resolves any infra or non-infra breaks. Akvelon team efficiently handle incoming requests from product developers and productively communicate with test-owners. Akvelon also provide constant automation of routine tasks and releasing time for onboarding new tasks/systems and always keep knowledge base up-to-date.
While meeting all SLA’s, investing into operational efficiencies enabled Akvelon to provide Microsoft additional business value and even take ownership of new engineering processes, which resulted in a higher ROI for Microsoft:
- Automated multiple process steps to for increased service efficiencies
- Completed automation for MSBIES Health Database backup
- PBI branching and build kickoff, saving 1.5 months of Microsoft FTE capacity per year
- Patching infrastructure servers, 3 months of Microsoft FTE capacity per year
- Patching special requests, providing additional FTE capacity savings
Technology Used
PowerShell, C#, Azure Web Portal, Git, TFS, MS Visual Studio
