Boot Barn Docker Migration
Standardization of microservices development — Success story
About the Company
Boot Barn Inc. is the largest seller of cowboy boots, hats, and cowboy and work attire in the US. The company owns two large online stores and over 550 physical stores and also sells via Amazon and eBay. It offers thousands of products and processes millions of orders each year.
The company's success is based on state-of-the-art Information Technology. The IT and eCommerce divisions develop and operate software systems that automate all business areas and perform most mission-critical tasks.
Challenges
In 2016, right after the merger of Boot Barn and Sheplers, the corporate IT team was tasked with integrating core business systems to automate and streamline internal processes. The initial version of the integration platform was launched in early 2017. It was implemented on the .NET version of Microsoft Service Fabric and deployed on the Azure cloud.
Two years later, the team decided that the Service Fabric microservices platform needed to catch up regarding desired performance. Although it did the work, the Service Fabric implementation of integration microservices took more work to build and maintain.
The team aimed to make the development model more convenient for developing and deploying microservices independently, ensuring better performance and the absence of stability issues. They approached Enterprise Innovation Consulting experts to achieve a superior and fast result.
The Solution We Proposed
To improve stability and runtime performance and raise development productivity, Enterprise Innovation Consulting offered to migrate the integration microservices from Service Fabric to .NET Core and Docker and deploy them on Azure Kubernetes Services.
What We Did
EIC designed a new reference architecture for event-driven integration microservices and created microservices templates with the required design patterns using .NET Core and Docker. After ~1 month, the new microservices development platform was ready.
After training the internal development team, EIC joined the effort to migrate the entire system integration to the new platform. In less than 6 months, the project was completed.
Microservices development was standardized through:
● Adoption of a reference architecture based on standardized components
● Development of component templates to accelerate development
● Implementation of design patterns to address common technical challenges
● Introduction of best practices into the development process
The Result
The new microservices development platform demonstrated far better stability and runtime performance. The latest development model allowed the team to develop, test, and deploy individual microservices, enabling incremental feature delivery. The well-designed architecture and templated implementations doubled development productivity, improved code maintainability and quality, and lowered complexity.
Additionally, it opened access to a much larger pool of developers skilled in Docker/Kubernetes and significantly shortened their onboarding time.
Performance Improvements:
● 2x+ increase in microservices development productivity
● 30%+ reduction in development costs
● 25% shorter time to market
● 40% shorter developer onboarding time
Testimonial
Nick Jimenez
Director of Development and Integrations
Boot Barn Inc.
We wanted significantly better performance for our Service Fabric-based integration platform. To avoid costly mistakes and ensure project success, we chose to begin the platform renovation with experts who specialize in microservices.
The team at Enterprise Innovation Consulting truly understood our needs and goals. They delivered an optimal solution by building a solid foundation for our future standardized development using .NET Core and Docker.
Our new architecture and templated implementations not only ensured far better runtime performance, but also doubled our microservices development productivity, improved code quality and maintainability while significantly reducing complexity.
Additionally, expanding our team became much easier, as it's far simpler to find specialists in Docker and Kubernetes
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