Achieving a DevOps Mindset

Wiley is a leading publisher of educational content for universities, businesses, and individuals. Through innovative learning solutions, the company empowers its customers to achieve their education and employment ambitions in an ever-changing world.

For over 200 years, Wiley has been developing the world’s knowledge ecosystem, from the classroom to the workplace. Wiley is headquartered in New Jersey, but has over 7,000 employees in 35 locations spread across 22 countries. In 2022, they reported $2.08 Billion in revenue.

Managing an Ever-Changing Software Landscape

With such a long history of offline publishing success, moving into the digital context wasn't without its challenges for Wiley.

To continue leading the way for global education, Wiley needed to improve its internal technological processes for developing innovative education solutions. The company needed to turn its education inward and move towards a DevOps mindset.

Wiley had enormous amounts of valuable information throughout the SDLC, but the data was fragmented and difficult to use. Developers were forced to follow a heavily manual process for change requests, which wasted time and slowed development velocity.

Wiley also needed increased visibility and understanding into its cloud infrastructure. The traditional approach — crawling production environments to collect this information — wasn't efficient or practical for such a large organization. With the cloud and infrastructure as code (IaC) approach, keeping up with environments constantly being provisioned or disposed of using automated crawlers or manual tracking was nearly impossible.

Wiley realized adopting a DevOps mindset would be crucial for solving its change management automation and infrastructure visibility issues. To help, they recruited outside assistance from RapDev—a ServiceNow Elite partner and expert at implementing DevOps methodologies.

Implementing a DevOps-First Mindset with RapDev

With RapDev’s help, Wiley built a pilot implementation of the ServiceNow DevOps module, which integrates JIRA, Jenkins, and other development tools.

The solution can automatically generate change management requests, saving developers time and vastly improving the time-to-production for code changes.

Using ServiceNow’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Wiley was able to gain valuable insights into its automated cloud infrastructure in real-time.

RapDev helped Wiley build an integration that mapped IaC repositories to the CMDB, which was able to import 2300 microservices in under 20 minutes. Even with some of its applications having code changes deployed into production several times a day, service registration that usually took several days was instantaneous with Github Commit webhooks. Wiley can now use the CMDB to get an accurate understanding of its highly elastic and dynamic infrastructure.

Increased Speed and Accuracy, Time Saved

Partnering with RapDev enabled the Customer to:

Wiley and RapDev worked closely together and collaborated effectively throughout the implementation project. Both teams overcame any pitfalls using Slack and other communication tools to build a working solution.

“In order to execute on the plan and build something, you need a certain type of relationship,” said Fedor Terlov, director of SRE at Wiley. “From that perspective, I didn’t differentiate people by the companies, but by the roles,” he continued. “So we just built the team that executed and got the results. It was very natural to work with RapDev.”

Within just a few months, RapDev and Wiley were able to implement the ServiceNow DevOps module pilot to streamline change requests and infrastructure management. Real-time microservice registration alone saves up to four hours of engineering time each week.

More importantly, however, Wiley made a significant step towards achieving a DevOps mindset and culture. Over the next year, Terlov hopes to leverage the new change management process across all development teams throughout the company and around the world.