akaWork is a DevOps platform born with the main goal of minimizing and eliminating gaps in the overproduction, inefficient production process, helping to create positive changes for the software industry, in order to increase productivity and promote quality for businesses.

Product integration platform and powerful digital transformation

Stemming from observations on many projects and study cases, DevOps team realizes the situation: employees when implementing a software project often face risks of productivity and quality of work. The cause comes from the complexity of the process and the loopholes in the process of working between roles together (QA, PM, PO, Dev, Test… ). If an error is found, the whole recovery process often causes the project team to take a lot of time and effort. The process to update a new version may take months.

Besides, the customer experience is not yet optimal, the interaction between customers and products is complicated, limited and unpredictable. Feedback from customers is received and processed slowly. This leads to a decrease in customer satisfaction and their desire to stick with it.

Seeing the potential in the market and its available capabilities, FPT Software’s DevOps service team shook hands with the “giant” Gartner, cherishing a product of integrated platform and powerful digital transformation that brings FPT brand a global coverage. From that fact, akaWork was born. akaWork is a DevOps platform with the main goal of minimizing and eliminating gaps in the overproduction, inefficient production process, helping to create positive changes for the software industry, to increase productivity and increase urgent quality from businesses.

The DevOps system aims to address loopholes in the software production process, thereby directly preventing risks that affect productivity and quality of work.

The product is applied to not only software projects of FPT Software, but also can be applied and deployed effectively for other member companies of FPT. The most intuitive example of the DevOps system is to help build a system strong enough to serve millions of visitors and to analyze behavior and direct customer experience.

The system consists of two main parts: Product akaWork and DevOps Deployment Services.

akaWork – DevOps platform

Product akaWork is a platform that provides professional DevOps solutions researched and developed by FPT Software; Help businesses achieve harmonization of cooperation between Product Owner, Developer, Testers, QA and IT. This DevOps platform consists of 5 main parts: akaBOARD, akaPIPELINE, akaTEST, akaREPO and akaADVISOR.

• akaBOARD: a custom dashboard system, which helps manage the progress and status of many projects effectively and systematically.
• akaPIPELINE: Standardized the CI/CD pipeline, integrated with the existing quality control systems and processes of the enterprise.
• akaTEST: TEST Studio with the function of managing and conducting test case effectively.
• akaREPO: centralized version control system capable of importing and synchronizing existing code base from popular vendors such as Git Hub, Bitbucket or upon request.
• akaADVISOR: Virtual mentor builds on AI technology to provide analysis and action recommendations for both technical and business managers.

Currently, akaBOARD has been deployed and used in FSU PMO meetings. Other components are being rushed to complete.

DevOps deployment service

DevOps provides comprehensive deployment services from evaluation, deployment, and training on DevOps as well as infrastructure lifecycle management services (from provisioning, operations to maintenance and monitoring). akaWork located in the DevOps tool chain system in the world is the most powerful integrated platform. Companies and projects do not need to change the tools they are using but still get the connection, centralized management of akaWork.

At FPT Software, DevOps started appearing in 2016 under the name of CICD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment). In early 2018, with the mission of changing the way software is made by FPT Software, akaWork was born in order to build a system and standards for all employees using DevOps.

The DevOps system includes tool components, solutions, processes. Continuous Integration (CI) helps control the situation through function buttons (UT, CQM, etc.) and the product achieves stability with the best quality possible.

Continuous Deployment (CD) helps application deployment to take place at any time and then even automatically offers a new version on a test or production environment if the build version passes all the previous nodes.

Initial successes

With more than 500 projects successfully deployed at FPT Software and many projects implemented for large customers, akaWork has taken deep automation into project management from planning, programming, testing to delivering to users, helping them to access, analyzing needs and trends… contributing greatly to improve and change services to best suit consumer tastes.

After more than a year in practice, the development team conducted surveys and obtained positive feedback from users. Most project management (PM), programmers (coder) think that DevOps helps the project save a lot of time and limits the number of errors arising during the implementation process. Measured results on a number of projects can see the greatest benefit of significantly shortening the upgrade time of versions up to 20 times, saving 27% effort, changing the culture and working style of the project.

Currently, the development team is working to improve the product with DevOps as Services orientation, besides building a DevOps ecosystem not only in FPT Software but also attracting experts as well as knowledge and skills from outside.

Phuong Thao – Thu Ha

FPT Tech Insight