Case: DevOps In Maritime Industry Digitalization

Well, that’s exactly what is about to be achieved.

“This is a huge opportunity for us”, says Houston Chairman of the Board Tomi Ruotimo. “The marine industry is about to present a whole new set of rules and standards on what technology can actually do. And they will certainly benefit from our experience in the digitalization of heavy industry.”

Maritime system automation

The ship’s situational awareness system accesses real-time situational information at sea and uses versatile interfaces to deliver the data to the bridge and to offshore control centers. The System also continuously assesses the data and prioritizes actions. ‘It would be wise to reroute due to an upcoming storm’, the computer might tell the captain on the bridge. And so, the vessel is safe, its cargo is safe, other vessels close-by are safe and all human beings involved are safe.

“It all began in January 2018”, says Ruotimo. “We developed a DevOps platform for our client in the maritime industry so that the client’s software development teams could produce increments to the software in short cycles, ensuring that the system can be reliably released at any time. They could test the system in smaller teams, and new updates could be released without involving the whole engineering staff.”

Rolling out by single command

Marvelous results certainly began rolling in within the system development when we stepped in. The different components of the system can now be rolled out by a single command of a single reliability engineer and new software versions could be deployed between various environments easily and considerably faster than before.

“That’s pretty nice for such a complex interplay between highly specialized software engineering and development languages”, says Ruotimo.

Minimum risk of human error

Houston’s key concepts are automatic code analysis, testing, and threat mitigation. When you don’t need days of human labor, you don’t have to carry the risks of human error – not to mention the cost of delay.

In mission-critical software, there’s simply no room for quality or compatibility issues. You want to configure, assemble and go. What you don’t want is arduous labor or defects.

What’s even more beautiful, the collaborative teams can now concentrate on the design and deployment of the System instead of crunching the code or dealing with outside interference.

No Big Bang Cutovers

“We take great pride in that our tech follows the industry standard”, Ruotimo says. “We are great believers in incremental delivery approach and don’t want anything to do with Big Bang Cutovers. I guess that’s why the Clients love us.”

Continuous quality assurance

Agile and easy-to-use – that’s our solution. The DevOps platform automatically runs automatic diagnostics suite for the software being developed and generates alerts on suspicious components and failed builds. You can thus concentrate on the business and not bother about the System until the system proactively notifies you.

“Find the root cause and fix the problem permanently, that’s our way to work”, Ruotimo underscores.

This is a huge productivity asset. Courtesy of Houston Inc.