Ample Organics reduces toil with self-service operations

Ample Organics builds technology that supports the Canadian cannabis business. They make adhering to compliance requirements easier by providing complete visibility into the supply chain of cannabis products from seed to harvest. 

Since the legalization of marijuana in Canada in 2018, Ample Organic’s business has grown tremendously. Today, about 70% of the Canadian cannabis market uses their software platform to track and report every stage of production and sales.

Managing the growth of the business, while maintaining customer SLAs, and meeting rigorous compliance standards is not an easy job for Ample Organic’s DevOps team. Glen Yu, Cloud Architect at Ample Organics, experiences this pressure first hand.

Increasing Complexity and Lead Time Causes Frustration

Ample Organics first brought in Rundeck to enable Self-Service operations and extend who could perform operations tasks. Ample Organics’ QA team consisted of contractors that helped with the businesses’ myriad of deploys. However, because of the complexity in some of the toolings and the strict compliance measures that needed to be met, the contractors had limited access to most of the underlying infrastructure, making it difficult for them to efficiently do their jobs. When a deployment was needed, the contractors filled out a ticket and assigned it to the Ample Organics infrastructure team--who then had to find time to complete the request in between their daily tasks. 

Before Ample Organics implemented Rundeck, this tedious process happened 5-7 times a day - with a lot of wasted time in between. Everyone was frustrated. Glen and the infrastructure team were unhappy with the number of daily interruptions, that increased as the business grew, and the contractors were frustrated at the amount of time they spent waiting for their requests to be fulfilled by the infrastructure team. 

Enabling Safe, Self-Service with Rundeck

Ample Organics developed Self-Service runbooks for infrastructure provisioning in Rundeck, allowing their contractors to safely provision environments themselves. The results? 

• Their contractors save time and frustration because they no longer needed to wait for an environment to be provisioned. 

• The infrastructure team at Ample Organics experiences 5-7 less interruptions per day and could rest easy knowing that Rundeck’s compliance-friendly solution allows them to extend who could perform operations tasks operations tasks, while keeping them in compliance. 

• Less lead time allows software deploys to be shipped faster, getting product to customers faster. 

• And with all of the time saved, the infrastructure team can focus on product improvements that better the business. 

Expanding Runbook Automation

Ample Organics quickly realized the value of using Rundeck for Self-Service operations and expanded their use to:

• Scheduling jobs during deployment windows in the middle of the night.

• Allow the members of the infrastructure team who weren’t as comfortable with some of the toolings to perform ad-hoc maintenance tasks via the easy to build (and use) dropdowns built into the Rundeck jobs.

Additionally, Ample found that Rundeck’s vast library of plugins and ability to integrate with different technologies and automation tools made their transition from Kubernetes to Nomad seamless.