SA Homes Adopts Docker to Speed Up App Deployment

The Problem

SA Homes is a South Africa-based company that provides home loans at discounted rates. Their objective is to develop strategies to beat the market rates for interest rates, and they have a history of being successful. The company focuses on customer service and transparency, helping their customers feel comfortable throughout the mortgage processsomething that is quite involved and complicated.

The loan industry uses data to help project the ideal interest rate when putting the loan together so that consumers will be able to purchase the best house for their money while at the same time ensuring that it is also a loan they can safely and reliably pay back. Anytime an organization uses data this heavily, their employees constantly find ways for their information systems to support them. SA Homes is no different. The company has experienced a great deal of success since its founding in 1999, growing into the fifth-largest mortgage company in South Africa. This growth led to an explosion in their employees use of information systems and consequently, their requests for updates and modifications to the system.

Unfortunately for SA Homes, their IS development office could not keep up with this demand for their services. For example, their app production team was able to deploy only two apps at a time in their development lab. The result was a waiting list to be considered for the actual production list. When managers encountered a problem or needed something developed, they had to wait in line. Additionally, several of the primary technologies they used ran on multiple codes and platforms. SA Homes realized that this entire process needed to be streamlined. Container technology offered them a method to achieve these goals. However, the company needed a reliable container provider.

The IT Solution

App developers have always encountered platform challenges. For example, if a developer built an application in a Windows environment, then it might not run properly if it were deployed after an update was installed. Most certainly it would not operate in a Linux environment. Multiple versions of an application would need to be developed to run in different environments. They would then constantly have to be tested on platform updates. This observation is also true of large installation software packages that provide IS functionality to organizations.

One solution is to build and test applications on a virtual machine and then implement them on an identical virtual machine for their customers. This solution removes the possibility that the application would be developed on one platform and then experience problems when it was deployed on a different one. But, what if you could develop an application that carried its own environment and would run as it was built regardless of the operating system on which it was deployed? That is exactly the idea of a container.

The Results

SA Homes implemented Docker to speed deployment times using a Docker data center. This move enabled the company to speed their app development because they could focus on the app and not the environment in which the app would run. They now build and deploy 2030 apps per day, compared with 2 per day previously. As a result, users can propose an idea for an app or a solution to a problem and the SA Homes IS development office can provide a solution for testing within days rather than weeks.

1. What other development methods could you combine with the use of containers to speed up development/deployment?