Staying true to its culture, adidas got 40% of its most impactful systems running on Kubernetes in a year

Challenge for Adidas :-

In recent years, the adidas team was happy with its software choices from a technology perspective—but accessing all of the tools was a problem. For instance, "just to get a developer VM, you had to send a request form, give the purpose, give the title of the project, who's responsible, give the internal cost center a call so that they can do recharges," says Daniel Eichten, Senior Director of Platform Engineering. "The best case is you got your machine in half an hour. Worst case is half a week or sometimes even a week."

Solution that was made :-

To improve the process, "we started from the developer point of view," and looked for ways to shorten the time it took to get a project up and running and into the adidas infrastructure, says Senior Director of Platform Engineering Fernando Cornago. They found the solution with containerization, agile development, continuous delivery, and a cloud native platform that includes Kubernetes and Prometheus.

Impact of the Solution :-

Just six months after the project began, 100% of the adidas e-commerce site was running on Kubernetes. Load time for the e-commerce site was reduced by half. Releases went from every 4-6 weeks to 3-4 times a day. With 4,000 pods, 200 nodes, and 80,000 builds per month, adidas is now running 40% of its most critical, impactful systems on its cloud native platform.

“For me, Kubernetes is a platform made by engineers for engineers. It’s relieving the development team from tasks that they don’t want to do, but at the same time giving the visibility of what is behind the curtain, so they can also control it.”

— FERNANDO CORNAGO, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PLATFORM ENGINEERING AT ADIDAS

“I call our cloud native platform the field of dreams. We built it, and we never anticipated that people would come and just love it.”

— DANIEL EICHTEN, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PLATFORM ENGINEERING AT ADIDAS

And adoption has spread quickly among adidas’s 300-strong engineering corps. “I call our cloud native platform the field of dreams,” says Eichten. “We built it, and we never anticipated that people would come and just love it.”

For one thing, “everybody who can touch a line of code” has spent one full week onboarding and learning the platform with members of the 35-person platform engineering team, says Cornago. “We try to spend 50% of our time sitting with the teams, because this is the only way to understand how our platform is being used. And this is how the teams will feel safe that there is someone on the other side of the wall, also feeling the pain.”

Additionally, Cornago and Eichten took advantage of the fact that as a fashion athletic wear brand, adidas has sports and competition in its DNA. “Top-down mandates don’t work at adidas, but gamification works,” says Cornago. “So this year we had a DevOps Cup competition. Every team created new technical capabilities and had a hypothesis of how this affected business value. We announced the winner at a big internal tech summit with more than 600 people. It’s been really, really useful for the teams.”

So if they had any advice for other companies looking to start a cloud native journey, it would be this: “There is no one-size-fits-all for all companies,” says Cornago. “Apply your company’s culture to everything that you do.”