A Modern Day Love Story: DevOps and DataOps

Consumers today expect ease, utility, and simplicity as part of the customer experience. And that means the margin of error is razor-thin for businesses. In fact, 32 percent of consumers say they would stop doing business with a brand they loved just after one bad experience.

But online dating giant eharmony knows a thing or two about customer relationships—and that extends beyond the relationships it creates between its customers. The company is driving a faster pace of innovation into IT to speed up software delivery and maintain its own relationship with over 10 million members.

The online dating space is a competitive industry, and eharmony knows only the best experience will keep these members from opting for a competitor’s services. That means continuously finding ways to improve its two critical applications, “Singles” and “Matching.” But its process for building and deploying new feature updates was facing a major obstacle: data provisioning.

The answer to this data heartache was to play matchmaker once again. By marrying two sets of IT best practices, DevOps and DataOps, eharmony was able to ensure a fast flow of features to the business. With DataOps, eharmony could get the right data to the right environment at the right time, all in a secure and compliant manner—realizing the promise of DevOps while saving millions of dollars.

Weak Data Will Leave Your Customers “Calling It Quits” With Your Product

For companies today, data management is as critical as software development. While eharmony had mastered deploying code within their pipeline at faster speeds, the actual release speed didn’t match this pace of the data. The inability to quickly deliver test data and streamline its QA processes was impeding the team’s ability to push out new features and functionality as quickly as they needed.

Accessing and refreshing all of that data, across disparate environments, required database administrators, storage specialists, and network administrators, who often put test data requests at the bottom of their to-do lists. As a result, QA teams had to make do with what they have—stale, partial, or synthetic data. This data created mistakes and errors that lead to software systems breaking down, extending the release cycle, and increasing the costs associated with fixing the defects. Thus, valuable development and testing time were wasted orchestrating data rather than creating and releasing quality code. The result? You’ve just lost your customer to your competitor.

Enter: DataOps, the alignment of people, process, and culture around the strategic use and end-to-end delivery of data. Through DataOps principles and technologies, eharmony was able to support self-service access to data and enable development and QA teams to create and refresh environments as needed—without the need for DBA assistance. DataOps helped eharmony’s software teams to complete test data refreshes in as soon as an hour and deliver relevant and accurate data to developers on-demand.

DataOps is “The One” for Speeding Application Development and Software Quality

eharmony is far from the only company dealing with a breakdown in its software testing and development due to data. According to a recent IDC study, more than 60% of companies claim that using data for projects is too time-consuming and that faster access to data is a top business priority (as it should be).

The most successful companies today are those who have embedded DataOps principles to feed data continuously in app delivery. Marrying these principles with a DevOps practice can transform how development teams leverage data to transform the customer experience.

By effectively combining DataOps and DevOps, eharmony is empowered to keep its promise to build deep connections and lasting relationships for its users as one of the most innovative matching apps and services on the market. The move also enabled the business to improve organizational efficiency, cutting storage requirements by as much as 80 percent and saving precious development time that amounts to $3,000,000 in cost savings.

What could the ability to use fast, secure data do for the customer experience across your apps and services? Read more about top CPG brands that are increasing data agility for application development, testing, and analysis.