Etsy’s Deployment Methodology
Etsy Case Study
Etsy is an online organization that facilitates the sale of vintage, handmade, and uniquely designed company products and goods to millions of consumers worldwide. The company through its website offers a variety of arts, food, clothing, beauty products, photographs, and toys among others. Etsy has struggled for many years with a slow, stressful and inconsistent site that has led to frequent downtimes and consumer frustration (Abrahams, 2008). Moreover, the organization has recorded a decline in sales over the years as a result of poor services and customer dissatisfaction. Consequently, the unfortunate events have exposed Etsy to increased competition from other online marketing platforms. Etsy uses the waterfall model as its primary software development methodology. The model has been effective as far as meeting the project’s requirement projects is concerned. However, the method’s undersides are that it is unresponsive and costly due to its strict control and structure. Also, the method only produced a four-hour complete deployment site two times in a week. However, Etsy through its solid management team made new transitions into a more upgraded and agile advancement.
Etsy adopted the DevOps Deployment methodology as an alternative model. The new method promised an increase in the department’s collaboration, speed, scale, security, and rapid delivery among others (Rahman & colleagues, 2015). Moreover, the technique enhanced the marketing time and decreased the failure rate cases of the organization’s new releases. The other aim of the alternative method was to automate continuous deployment in the company to allow a smooth and reliable flow of consumer operations. The implementation of the alternative raised Etsy’s prospects of enhanced customer’s satisfaction, improved supply quality goods, increased efficiency, and productivity.
Etsy’s solid management teams considered several business factors in choosing the DevOps Deployment Methodology (Rahman & colleagues, 2015). The first element was the market time for online products and goods, which the organization aimed at improving to enhance consumer access. The second factor was the deployment rate of the complete site from four hours for two weeks to extended hours on weekly bases. The third factor was the cost of the project initialization since although the waterfall method was easy to manage; it was costly. The fourth factor was the frequency of consumer updates and the collaboration of the management teams with the users (Davis & Daniels, 2016). Other factors included delivery speed and practices and adaptability to market changes.
The DevOps Deployment Methodology was beneficial to the organization. The method’s benefits outweigh Etsy’s faults. I believe that this method unlike the waterfall or rapid development methodology is the best. In response to the quality of goods and products, marketing time, collaborative working, and project cost among others, the methodology’s performance in these areas is excellent. Furthermore, the methodology has allowed 50 or more deployments to be carried out with minimal disruptions (Rahman and colleagues, 2015). Issues of speed and updates slowing the site have also been addressed. Consumers can now buy, sell and supply their products more conveniently. Also, the method allows the company to automate the deployment pipeline leading to increased efficiency and productivity. Initial project costs have also been minimized due to the collaborative process between developers, operation teams and consumers. Although all consumers may not favor frequent updates, they are essential towards the marketing of products and services in Etsy’s online marketing platform.
References
Abrahams, S. L. (2008). Handmade online: The Crafting of Commerce, Aesthetics and Community on Etsy. com (Doctoral dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
Davis, J., & Daniels, R. (2016). Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale. O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Rahman, A. A. U., Helms, E., Williams, L., & Parnin, C. (2015). Synthesizing Continuous Deployment Practices Used in Software Development. In 2015 Agile Conference (pp. 1-10). IEEE.
