Success Story

BP modernizes infrastructure, introduces DevOps with self-service platform

Overview

BP is a global energy company that explores for and produces oil and gas and manufacturers and markets fuels, lubricants, and petrochemicals—all with a focus on lowering carbon emissions to protect the planet. BP needed a reliable, modern technology infrastructure to speed application development and deployment. It worked with Red Hat to simplify and modernize technology and processes, increasing security and agility and speeding provisioning from 2-3 weeks to 7 minutes.

Icon-Red_Hat-Media_and_documents-Quotemark_Open-B-Red-RGB Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform gives us the ability to safely manage tens of thousands of microservices at scale. I don’t see any other container platforms that can do that as safely and securely as OpenShift.

Paul Costall

Head of Application Engineering Services, BP

bp
  • INDUSTRY
    Oil and Gas
  • REGION
    EMEA
  • LOCATION
    London, England
  • SIZE
    74,000 employees in more than 70 countries

Challenge

Modernize a complex technology infrastructure

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.

Solution

Build a self-service platform and a DevOps culture

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.”

Software & Services

Business Outcome

Increase agility, security, and speed to market—at scale

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.”

Icon-Red_Hat-Media_and_documents-Quotemark_Open-B-Red-RGB The power of the partnership with Red Hat came through our co-creation and collaboration and their understanding of our complex problems. The combination of those minds, and the open thinking of those minds, is what the strength of the partnership is all about.

Ed Alford

Vice President, Digital Transformation, BP

See how BP worked with Red Hat

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