The OEM’s production environment was deeply reliant on hardwired, on-premises infrastructure. It had served faithfully for decades, but cracks had begun to show:

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• Brittle deployment processes: Deployments took over 5 hours, with minimal rollback support.
• Limited scalability: Adapting to new requirements meant weeks of custom work and testing.
• No cloud integration: Systems were incompatible with modern SaaS and infrastructure-as-code paradigms.
• Lack of redundancy: Failover systems were manual and reactive, rather than automated or predictive.

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Worst of all, these limitations created a single point of failure in one of the OEM’s most critical business systems. Any outage—no matter how short—could disrupt the global manufacturing schedule.

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The business didn’t just need new software—it needed new ways of working. That’s where Gloster came in.

After a rigorous five-year tendering process, Gloster was selected to implement and operate the DevOps model underpinning the OEM’s transformation initiative.

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What did that mean in practice?

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• We became the DevOps Provider: Embedded within the organisation, Gloster took ownership of pipeline design, test strategy, release orchestration, and platform reliability.
• More than tooling: While automation was key, so was accountability. Gloster managed release health, team coordination, and production readiness across dozens of services.
• Working across boundaries: Our teams in Hungary, Germany, and Portugal worked hand-in-hand with internal teams and other vendors, ensuring alignment without overlap.

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We weren’t just supporting the transformation—we were driving it.

What does DevOps look like at this scale? Here’s what we delivered:

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Modular, Cloud-Native Architecture

The legacy monolith was decomposed into 60+ microservices, each independently deployable and testable. This allowed teams to parallelise development, reduce risk, and continuously improve.

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CI/CD & Blue/Green Deployments

Gloster implemented automated CI/CD pipelines with full test coverage, validation environments, and blue/green release strategies. This reduced deployment time from over 5 hours to under 5 minutes.

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Bi-Weekly Production Releases

Gone were the days of quarterly release windows. With automation and observability in place, we enabled a bi-weekly release cadence, dramatically increasing responsiveness to business needs.

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24/7 Continuity and Shadow Deployments

We ensured zero unplanned downtime by deploying in parallel with shadow systems. Each release was validated in a live environment before go-live, with instant failback capacity in place.

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Platform Observability

Using Prometheus and Grafana, we built real-time dashboards and alerts, allowing engineering and operations teams to monitor the system’s health, latency, and availability at a granular level.

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The transformation was more than a technical success—it became a strategic capability.

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• Deployment time reduced by 98%, from 5 hours to under 5 minutes
• Nightly delivery of Just-in-Time data to over 40+ factories across multiple geographies
• Zero downtime throughout the transformation process
• Real-time failover and automated recovery embedded into the platform
• Recognition from the OEM as a trusted partner in their strategic digital journey

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This wasn’t a case of ‘lift and shift’. It was a full reinvention of how the organisation builds, tests, ships, and supports its most important software systems.

The transformation offers several lessons for enterprise teams facing similar challenges:

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1. DevOps Is Not a Role—It’s a Responsibility

Being the DevOps Provider means more than running Jenkins or writing YAML. It’s about owning the release lifecycle from development through production, with clear lines of accountability and continuous feedback.

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2. Microservices Aren’t Enough Without Orchestration

Decomposing the system was a start. But the real value came from orchestration—ensuring that services were versioned, tested, observed, and deployed in sync.

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3. Shadow Deployment Protects the Business

By validating releases in a shadow environment before go-live, we removed the guesswork—and ensured business continuity.

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4. Automation Enables Agility, But Discipline Sustains It

CI/CD was transformative, but only because it was built with test coverage, rollback support, environment parity, and stakeholder visibility. Automation without governance creates chaos.

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5. Real DevOps Models Cross Boundaries

This project required alignment across vendor lines, time zones, and cultures. Gloster’s nearshore profile and multilingual teams allowed us to integrate seamlessly with existing structures, rather than force new ones.

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Enterprise IT doesn’t transform overnight. Especially not in a high-stakes environment where downtime can cost millions. But with the right partner, the right strategy, and a commitment to both reliability and velocity, change can happen—without disruption.

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Gloster’s work with this Bavarian OEM proves that DevOps isn’t just for cloud-native startups. It’s for any business that needs to move fast without breaking things.

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If you’re staring down a legacy monolith, struggling with pipeline delays, or simply want to modernise without risk, we’d love to share what we’ve learned.

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Let’s talk about what DevOps-as-a-Service could look like for your business.

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