Case Studies: Macy's Private QA Cloud

ServePath is powering the quality assurance server infrastructure for Macys.com content updates through a hybrid cloud / colocated architecture. The design and implementation was done by GoGrid solutions partner GridDynamics with their Cloud4QA implementation.

Before:

• Macys.com was limited to 6 staging environments
• Frequent content and promotional updates caused QA bottlenecks

After:

• Self-service, on demand deployment of additional staging environments in < 1 hour
• More flexibility and significant cost savings for QA

GridDynamics designed a QA environment for Macy's that combined the following elements:

• Co-location of security hardware in ServePath's San Francisco datacenter
• VPN connection back to Macys datacenter
• CloudConnect private backend connection between the co-located hardware and GoGrid cloud servers
• GoGrid public IP addresses were disabled to send all traffic back out via VPN to Macy's datacenter

Combined with a user interface built by GridDynamics, this hybrid hosting solution provided an effective "private cloud" for Macy's, and enabled the Macys.com QA team to control their own environment (with supervision from the IT group, of course). Server deployments for new testing were reduced from 1 day to 1 hour, eliminating occasional QA bottlenecks due to IT resource constraints or QA scheduling conflicts.

Macys has seen significant operational cost savings by being able to deploy GoGrid cloud servers on demand, with no capital expenditures or wasted resources, and delete them upon the conclusion of a QA cycle. The solution has also enabled new quality assurance improvements, such as the ability to QA multiple weeks of releases at a time instead of just 1 week ahead as was done in the past.

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