Technology Magazine August 2018 | Page 14

PADDY POWER BETFAIR

14

— Cathal Sheridan ,

Technology Director

delivery teams by removing itself as a dependency in the code-to-deployment process . To do this the team created its new infrastructure stack , i2 ( Infrastructure v2 ), encompassing a private software defined datacenter ( SDDC ) and a fully automated continuous integration / deployment ( CI / CD ) pipeline . This has given software delivery teams the ability to independently deploy their applications using the i2 pipeline to acquire compute , storage , and network resources , independent of PPB ’ s infrastructure team .

“ The pipeline had to be flexible , not only offering rolling updates and blue-green deployments , but also powerful A / B testing features to allow delivery teams to trial the effectiveness of new customer features ,” says Sheridan .

“ Creating the pipeline technology has been a joint project between infrastructure and delivery teams , resulting in the ability to make thousands of deployments weekly . “ Both Paddy Power and Betfair had very strong technology assets to draw on . Betfair had put a greater focus on owning the software that encapsulates differentiating product IP , crucial to creating market-winning customer experiences . While Paddy Power had a particular strength in infrastructure resilience and scaling .

“ Interestingly at the time of the merger we discovered that both teams had highly aligned views on the future of CI / CD and the importance of delivery pipelines for iterative product development and rapid delivery ,” he continues .

“ Right from the start we had common ground making it relatively straightforward to choose the strongest design thinking from each

AUGUST 2018