CURRENT OPENINGS

Furniture Industry Leader

Challenge

Modernizing Sales & Distribution: automated CI/CD, rehearsed cutovers, and resilient cloud operations

Executive summary
A leading U.S. furniture manufacturer partnered with Zion Cloud Solutions (ZCS) to modernize its sales and distribution systems. Leveraging ZCS’s CloudScale accelerator and cloud services, the engagement automated CI/CD pipelines, introduced infrastructure-as-code and full-stack observability, and rehearsed production cutovers.

The result: release lead time fell dramatically (≈67% reduction) and Sev-1/2 incidents dropped by ~80% during and after cutovers — enabling faster, safer releases and markedly improved system reliability.

Background

The client operated a complex sales + distribution platform (order entry, inventory sync, ERP/SAP integrations, B2B dealer portals, CRM). The existing environment had:

  • Long, manual release processes and risky cutovers (many dependencies across services).
  • Frequent Sev-1/2 incidents during or shortly after production releases.
  • Limited automated testing and observability, making root-cause analysis slow.
  • Need to accelerate time-to-market for pricing/promotions while keeping uptime for dealers and stores.

Zion Cloud Solutions had prior experience with furniture and consumer goods modernization projects.

Goals

  1. Reduce release lead time and increase release frequency without increasing risk.
  2. Reduce critical incidents related to deployments by improving pre-production validation and cutover practices.
  3. Provide repeatable, documented, and automated runbooks for cutovers that support business continuity.
  4. Improve end-to-end monitoring, alerting and post-deploy observability.

Zion Cloud Solutions approach & solution components

ZCS applied a phased modernization managed under their CloudScale accelerator and Cloud Services offering — combining cloud migration, DevSecOps, automated CI/CD and observability.

1) Assessment & migration planning

  • Performed dependency mapping for services, data flows to ERP/3PL/CRM, and identified cutover risk windows.
  • Designed a migration and release strategy (staged cutovers, canary/blue-green options) to minimize customer and dealer impact.

2) Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) & automated environments

  • Converted infra to IaC (Terraform/ARM templates) to create reproducible environments (dev → qa → canary → prod).
  • Automated environment provisioning in the target cloud (Azure/GCP) and secured access patterns (ZCS is a Microsoft Solutions Partner).

3) Automated CI/CD pipelines (CloudScale)

  • Built end-to-end pipelines (build, automated tests, integration tests, security scans) to enable rapid, repeatable releases.
  • Integrated security checks (DevSecOps) in pipelines to catch vulnerabilities earlier. CloudScale specifically highlights CI/CD automation and full-stack observability as features.

4) Rehearsed cutovers and release orchestration

  • Developed scripted, automated cutover procedures and “rehearsed cutovers” (full dry-run deployments across staging/canary environments) so teams could validate steps and timing before production.
  • Implemented rollback strategies (automated rollback via the pipeline, feature flags, and database migration rollbacks where applicable).

5) Observability, monitoring & incident response

  • Deployed full-stack observability: application traces, infrastructure metrics, logs, and synthetic tests to detect regressions.
  • Automated alerts and runbooks for common failure modes; created post-incident analysis process for continuous improvement.

6) Training & handover

  • Trained SRE, release engineering, and application teams in using pipelines, runbooks, and the monitoring dashboards.
  • Created an on-call playbook to reduce mean time to acknowledge/resolve incidents.

Technical architecture (summary)

  • Cloud provider: Azure (ZCS is an Azure partner) with Gov/enterprise controls as needed.
  • IaC: Terraform/ARM to provision compute, networking, managed DB and CI/CD agents.
  • CI/CD: Pipeline orchestration (e.g., Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions) integrated with automated testing and security scanning.
  • Release patterns: Canary and blue-green deployment options plus feature flags.
  • Observability: APM + logs + metrics.
  • Security: DevSecOps checks in pipeline, identity federation/SSO for ops (ZCS has experience integrating SSO solutions in similar engagements).

Outcomes

  • Release lead time reduced by ~67% — faster deployment cadence and shorter time from code commit to production changes.
  • Sev-1/2 incidents decreased by ~80% — rehearsed cutovers + better testing/observability reduced production outages and high-severity incidents.
  • Fewer emergency hotfixes and lower production rollback frequency due to better pre-production validation and canary processes.

Improved confidence to run promotions and configuration changes (business stakeholders could release more frequently with less risk).

Conclusion

By partnering with Zion Cloud Solutions, the furniture industry leader achieved faster, safer, and more reliable releases. Automated CI/CD, rehearsed cutovers, and strong DevSecOps practices cut release lead time by 67% and reduced critical incidents by 80%, enabling continuous delivery, higher stability, and greater business agility.