BP had a complex operational management approach with hundreds of product teams using various delivery models, which affected application development and deployment. To deliver on its dual challenge of meeting the world’s increasing demand for more energy while producing fewer emissions, BP wanted to explore a robust, modern, open source technology infrastructure that could operate worldwide and be accessed by thousands of business users and millions of end customers. “We wanted to develop a strategic platform to support internal development and accelerate that development from initial investigation and innovation through production,” said Paul Costall, head of application engineering services at BP.

To simplify processes and enhance productivity, BP used Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build the Application Engineering Services’ Digital Conveyor. This platform provides process automation that empowers product delivery teams with self-service capabilities, a DevOps approach, and a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. “The combination of microservices, containers, and a fully automated CI/CD platform provides what developers have been asking for for years,” said Costall. “They now have full self-service to deliver change from the initial idea, through the innovation, right through to production, as quickly as humanly possible.”

With the Digital Conveyor platform, BP can now provision a new environment in 7 minutes, instead of 2-3 weeks, allowing developers to innovate quickly and better support business goals. The new platform also runs security scans on every build and container, rather than static scans based on project milestones. “Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform gives us the ability to safely manage tens of thousands of microservices at scale,” said Costall. “I don’t see any other container platforms that can do that as safely and securely as OpenShift.” Also, the platform empowers DevOps teams to embrace self-service. “We used to think, ‘There’s the business. There’s architecture. There’s developers. There’s support,’” said Bruno Rothgiesser, digital solutions architect at BP. “Now it’s just one team, co-creating software and digital capabilities. That’s a big change—a big, positive transformation in the way we work.”