Case Studies

The Home Depot had its sights set on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD), but getting a machine built was taking anywhere from several days to a week. Spinning up machines and getting rid of them just as quickly was a challenge. The resource provisioning process was causing major bottlenecks in business productivity. The company lacked an effective way to track and manage resources, particularly in its hybrid cloud environment. Future-proofing IT was a major initiative. Containers would eventually become a major focus area, and an agnostic cloud platform would be key to supporting the company's goals. Challenge Solution The Home Depot Moves From Manual Provisioning in the Hybrid Cloud, Shifts Focus to Providing Self-Service Infrastructure Hybrid cloud is the prevailing strategy for enterprise IT environments, and The Home Depot's IT strategy is no exception. Its IT team wanted to focus on CICD, but provisioning IT resources was taking anywhere from several days to a week on average. The team needed to be able to spin up machines and bring them down just as quickly to keep pace in today's hybrid-forward landscape. "The infrastructure landscape is shifting, and cloud services and scalability are major priorities in the enterprise," said Kevin Priest, Technology Director of IaaS & Cloud at The Home Depot. "As we progress and offer more diverse solutions, the cloud sometimes makes more sense than on-prem. At the same time, our end users' experience shouldn't be fragmented. Using a hybrid cloud management platform enables us to provide a common experience, regardless of the underlying hosting provider." With their sights set on providing self-service infrastructure server builds to end-users, the Home Depot IT group started evaluating homegrown tools versus platforms available in the market. Their ultimate goal was to provide front-facing infrastructure services to their developers. Swift Time to Value and Need for Ease of Use Bring Home Depot to CloudBolt After considering several market-leading solutions, Home Depot decided on CloudBolt Software. "We didn't need to do a lot of customization with CloudBolt compared to what other solutions required," recalled Zachary Hardin, Senior Manager of Open Systems Engineering at The Home Depot. "CloudBolt has a well-thought-out user interface and superior extensibility on the orchestration side. It enabled us to get up and running and quickly deliver value to our customers. This made CloudBolt an excellent fit." The team felt that CloudBolt's offering was more mature out of the box than its competitors. They also saw the benefit of easy integration and a multitude of plug-ins. "The flexibility in providing the framework allowed us to integrate with what was already there without a super heavy lift," Hardin explained. The solutions engineering team at CloudBolt worked with The Home Depot to get the product up and running. CloudBolt implementation is simple, which was one of the primary reasons The Home Depot made its choice. "Implementation was easy. CloudBolt's flexible framework made integration with existing infrastructure a breeze," Priest said. C A S E S T U D Y

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