Equinix increases the agility of their DevOps teams with self-serviceability and automation.

Equinix is the leading global data center company. With over 180+ colocation facilities across five continents, Equinix interconnects today’s largest global enterprises, enabling these companies to easily bring together employees, partners, and customers across the world. This case study focuses on Equinix’s client-side development teams, who are responsible for building software products and business critical applications.

Like most companies serving global enterprise customers, development speed, self-serviceability and the ability to ship fixes and features in a timely manner are the primary reasons for Equinix to pursue new tools. To better meet the needs of their customers, Equinix, who is one of the early adopters of DevOps culture and best practices, realized the need to refine their tools to improve speed and agility.

The development teams at Equinix were using Subversion (SVN), which initially met most of their needs. However, the team wanted to adopt more sophisticated DevOps practices, and needed a version control system that could provide self-serviceability and support distributed workflows to support globally distributed development teams. Ultimately, they wanted a solution that would help developers code better and faster to bring customers new features quickly.

Equinix first started with an open source Git solution which checked the box on enabling distributed workflows. However, as the team matured and started defining detailed workflows, branching, and tagging strategies, they needed a more robust system that would meet their enterprise control and scaling needs. More specifically, they were looking for a tool that could handle granular authentication and authorization, enabled user management, and self-serviceability at enterprise scale. It also needed to be API enabled, to speed up CI workflows, and to support the organization’s high availability and global scaling needs.

With GitLab, Equinix can now ensure that every team follows defined development workflows, such as code check-in, code review, and continuous integration. Using GitLab’s advanced code review features, like merge request approvers and GitLab APIs, Equinix can be confident that all code is reviewed before it’s merged.

Continuous integration is also a big part of the team’s workflow and they needed a way to trigger CI jobs in Jenkins, publish the code analysis, and provide visibility. Using GitLab’s Jenkins integration and GitLab APIs, the DevOps-Tools Engineering Team at Equinix was able to integrate multiple DevOps tools and products to enable CI/CD workflows.

Equinix was successful in rolling out GitLab to enable specialized workflows along with self-serviceability for their development teams. Along with encouraging self-serviceability, Equinix, increased the agility of their developers and can ensure quality through automation. The development teams view GitLab as a mature code review and code management system.

Equinix plans to use GitLab’s built-in Docker Container Registry, since they entered into containers in early 2015 and most of their custom workflows are containerized today. They focus on building containerized workloads which will support their global deployments. As Equinix looks to reduce the use of multiple systems serving the same purpose in their DevOps landscape, GitLab’s integrated Docker Container Registry removes the need to have an independent registry and will make it much easier for their development teams to upload, tag, refer and share their container images.