Amdocs adopts next-gen tools to lead its cloud-native transformation journey

More companies than ever before have been moving to cloud-native services. The benefits of cloud-native services lift the constraints of traditional infrastructure, helping companies focus on the customer experience rather than technological errors, and facilitate the ability for teams to move quickly and easily from idea to execution. This is the strategy that the Amdocs Delivery division have been building and executing on over the last few years, ultimately benefitting the end customer.

The migration from – and modernization of – monoliths to cloud-native, distributed environments has become one that most companies, ranging from startups to enterprises like Amdocs have adopted. However, this is not a simple move and comes with many challenges. As a giant software house, they have faced challenges of juggling modernizing monoliths, managing their newly distributed modern environments with the legacy code, and having visibility into those same environments.To be better prepared for this, and as part of Amdocs’s cloud-native transformation strategy, Amdocs set up a central team to examine and introduce new tools and capabilities to empower their R&D teams, such as the Rookout Live Debugger and introduced RedHat OpenShift infrastructure. Together, these enable developers to have Rookout in their project and identify the root cause of an issue easily and quickly.

Finding the root cause of an issue quickly

Rookout was selected specifically to be used by Amdocs R&D teams as it allows software engineers to instantly access the code-level data they need to understand complex, modern applications. The use of Rookout has given the Amdocs developers significant insight into their applications, by enabling them to collect any piece of data from the deepest levels of code in their environments, with the click of a button. This allows them to get to the root cause faster – most significantly when working in complex cloud-native environments – speeding up their workflows, and helping to deliver quality features and support faster, and helping preserve their customers’ experience.

According to Syed Waheed Rizvi, Engineering Team Lead, “It’s very useful that you can debug multiple environments, clusters, and jam simultaneously when using Rookout. Sometimes, the issues we investigate lie in the environment or database rather than the code, and Rookout allows us to find that, quickly. Rookout has fast-tracked our processes and sped up the time we spend troubleshooting.”

Rookout is an enterprise-ready tool that is used by many top enterprise companies worldwide. Due to its ISO 27001 certification, SOC 2 Type II audit, and GDPR and CCPA compliance, Amdocs found it to be the right solution for them, particularly as they work in many sensitive environments.

Rookout’s capabilities have already been deployed in over 9000 unique instances throughout 25 different teams within Amdocs. Over the last two years, over 750 different developers have used the tool, and the impact has been immensely positive. When the Amdocs team would deploy a few changes in one of their environments, and something went wrong, they automatically turned to Rookout. They didn’t have to add a log line and redeploy. Instead, they were able to place a breakpoint and see the data come through easily, allowing them to fix their bug in a matter of minutes.

One of the biggest benefits that the Amdocs team found when using Rookout is the fact that it has been designed, from day one, for production environments. When developers use it, they can debug without risk, as Rookout does not allow them to edit the source code or impact the running of the application. As Ajitesh Kumar, Software developer specialist, shared, “This is a significant improvement on the previous workflows that had to be followed. Using Rookout means that we don’t have to wait for the infrastructure team to set up environments for us or to turn debug on. We can simply go ahead and collect the data we need from our running applications, when we need it”.

RedHat OpenShift enables automatic deployment and adoption of Rookout

Another key part of Amdocs’ cloud-native strategy was to ensure that the introduction of new tools and processes are carried out in a centralized and scalable manner. To do so, they needed to ensure that the deployment process of Rookout would be done simply and effectively by becoming a seamless part of each team’s workflow so that any new instance deployed would be set up correctly with Rookout. This was the driver behind Amdocs developing its own certified Red Hat OpenShift Operator.

Red Hat OpenShift Operators automate the creation, configuration, and management of instances of Openshift Kubernetes-native applications. The Operators provide automation at every level of the stack, taking human operational knowledge and encoding it into software that is more easily packaged and shared with consumers. The various Delivery teams at Amdocs are leveraging the power of Operators to run and autonomously manage their cloud-native applications, allowing for quick installation and frequent, robust updates. In addition, these operators are also used to automatically enable Rookout’s capabilities in any new microservice that is deployed, meaning that an Amdocs developer can simply start debugging a running microservice from the moment that it is deployed.

This operator allows the automated injection of Rookout’s capabilities into every deployment. Every application that passes through Amdocs’s CI/CD is then deployed with Rookout, which gives Amdocs’s developers the ability to debug any line of code, in any environment, whenever they need to. The introduction of the Operator has helped Amdocs’ deployment process become even more effective and simple.

Rookout empowers Amdocs developers

As large enterprises set out ambitious technological strategies, such as Amdocs did with their cloud-native journey, it is important to carefully consider which are the right tools that will enable their R&D teams to be their most effective and efficient.

The use of Rookout’s Live Debugger has had a significant impact on Amdocs’s developers by empowering them to resolve their issues faster and more efficiently and as a result, focus on giving a better and faster customer experience. As Rohit Ranjan, Software Developer, said: “Without Rookout, I would have had to spend 1-2 days to set everything up on my local system to debug. It allows me to fix my bug in a matter of minutes. I can simply go ahead and access the data I need when I need it.”.

Amdocs’ approach to using Rookout’s Live Debugger alongside the design of the automated deployment through using Amdocs’ Red Hat OpenShift Operator has seen the company enjoy many benefits, predominantly the ability to maintain their customer experience and code quality through being able to gain deeper insight into their running code, thus allowing them to solve issues easier and faster across all platforms and teams.