What Keeps Transurban With Perforce P4? Larger, Faster DevOps Deployments and Agile Releases.

Transurban manages and develops urban toll road networks in Australia and the United States, and partners with governments to provide infrastructure solutions. And they’re bringing IoT to traffic by backing the development of smart roads. Perforce P4 helps them support faster deployments and Agile releases on their way to achieving DevOps.

Why Transurban Relies on P4

• Lightning-fast -- even syncing a file that was 27 GBs
• Single source of truth for files in 25 environments
• Integration with Jenkins for continuous delivery
• Traceability is an integral part of the system
• Automated scripting with consistent tags

Profile

•    One of the world’s largest owners and operators of toll roads
•    Established in 1996
•    Headquarters in Melbourne, Australia 
•    2,000 employees
•    200 users on P4

Achieving True DevOps

Transurban started using P4 because the consultants they were working with recommended it. But they’ve been Perforce customers since 2011 because P4 has transformed the way Transurban worked.

One of the biggest challenges Transurban wanted to overcome? Getting to DevOps deployments and an Agile methodology. “All our builds were incremental. We had an ever-growing list of deployables that needed packages,” said Matthew de Vanny, Technical Environment Specialist at Transurban. Now, they have a full DevOps environment.

With P4, Transurban can release larger deployments faster, and they can deploy in a DevOps environment. They’re able to do this because P4 can:

•    Securely manage all digital content in a single source of truth. 
•    Provide lightning-fast access to the latest files for fast builds.
•    Find files across Transurban’s 25 development environments.
•    Integrate with Jenkins to automate their software delivery.
•    Integrate with Jira for defect tracking and Jira user stories. 

P4 Enabled 75% Faster Deployments

Before using P4, a medium-sized deployment for Transurban’s toll systems took at least eight hours. Large releases weren’t even possible. Now, thanks to P4, those same medium-sized deployments take about two hours.

At the end of 2017, Transurban had an enormous release when they brought the systems from their Queensland office on board. “We completed that in a weekend. With our previous methodologies, that wouldn’t have been deployable,” said Matthew.

P4 Uniquely Supports Reproducible Builds for Consistent Quality

When Matthew started working at Transurban in June 2016, one of his first projects was to create consistency – consistent branching strategies, consistent labels, consistent processes. You can’t automate things until they’re consistent and orderly, and Transurban wasn’t there yet.

Transurban used P4’s flexible branching and workflow options to fully customize and improve their software configuration management processes from end to end. Key to this workflow was Transurban’s use of the jobs feature, so they could quickly trigger labels on demand.

Unique to P4, labels can be applied to both code and artifacts stored in the version control system. This is well suited to a complex IoT system that includes a variety of technologies like Transurban’s smart road sensor systems. 

Consistent labels, names, and descriptions for code and dependencies in artifacts ensure that when it’s time for deployments, everything is strictly managed. Because of that consistency, Transurban now deploys faster and more reliably.

Reliability and Resilience in a Version Control System

Reliability is important – especially when managing critical transportation infrastructure. System downtime or data loss could greatly impact customer service.

The detailed checkpointing and journals capability of P4 provide a snapshot of the version control system and a replayable history of all changes made. This allows Transurban to accurately roll back specific changes made for an in-flight project in the event that business requirements or project scope change. These features also provide a defense against any negative impacts of inadvertent user error while interacting with the source repository.

Try it Yourself

See why the world’s most innovative brands rely on the world’s fastest version control software. P4 is free for teams up to 5 users. Download now.