Abercrombie & Fitch accelerates transformation with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Dynatrace

As part of the effort to grow its direct to consumer business, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (A&F) needed to modernize its e-commerce platform and allow its IT teams to innovate faster. To enable this, A&F decided to move away from its traditional application environment and adopt a modern microservices and container architecture. It selected Red Hat OpenShift as the platform for this technology refresh, valuing the maturity of its cloud-native offering and the ease and speed with which it could be deployed.

With Red Hat OpenShift, A&F could optimize its continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline and more readily adopt DevOps to improve operational stability and achieve greater control and consistency during the rollout of e-commerce platform updates. However, the shift to a more dynamic cloud ecosystem made it difficult for A&F to maintain complete visibility with its existing monitoring solution. With its existing approach to monitoring, A&F’s IT teams would need to manually inject script into individual container images, a cumbersome and time-consuming task. A&F realized it needed a new approach that was purpose-built for today’s cloud.

After evaluating the market, A&F selected Dynatrace’s AI-powered software intelligence platform. Aside from its partnership with Red Hat and compatibility with Red Hat OpenShift, A&F was attracted to Dynatrace by the simplicity with which it could be deployed. Dynatrace OneAgent® meant A&F could install it on a single cluster and then sit back as it automatically discovered and instrumented its entire Red Hat OpenShift environment. Dynatrace’s zero configuration approach and powerful AI engine, Davis®, also meant it was able to provide instant value, delivering performance insights that allowed A&F to increase operational efficiency and proactively improve customer experience.

“What enamored us with Dynatrace was that it gave us insight into things we didn’t even know we wanted to see,” explains Jay Summerlot, IT Director, Abercrombie & Fitch. “With other solutions, we had to know exactly what we wanted to see and then push and pull a load of buttons and levers to get the information out. Most other solutions are also blind to containerized environments and struggle to instrument Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift. Dynatrace was purpose-built for these environments, giving us instant answers and out of the box value from day one.”

• Ease of deployment – A&F was able to achieve full-stack, visibility into applications running in Red Hat OpenShift in a few hours of deploying Dynatrace, as opposed to three days with the familiar monitoring solution it had been using for the past seven years.
• Faster transformation – The initial migration to a microservices architecture was expected to last 12 months, but the unparalleled visibility from Dynatrace allowed A&F to accelerate the initial on-boarding project.
• Peace of mind – Because Dynatrace OneAgent becomes part of the Red Hat OpenShift platform, any new microservice that is deployed is automatically discovered and instrumented, giving A&F’s developers the observability they need to rapidly onboard applications without worry.
• Greater stability – Dynatrace enables A&F to build AI-powered quality gates into the delivery pipeline, automatically detecting problems so that no bad code reaches production, to ensure quality and consistency in application performance and availability.
• Seamless collaboration – The software intelligence from Dynatrace bridges the gap between the application and infrastructure teams at A&F, so they can work more collaboratively and pinpoint problems within minutes, without wasting time in war rooms.

“Dynatrace allows our teams to spend more time fixing problems than looking for them. It’s given us a common language and true sense of partnership within IT, providing our teams with a single source of the truth so they can work together to resolve problems. There’s a lot more eyes on Dynatrace than we ever had on our previous solution, which is testament to the value it provides. Looking to the future, we see Dynatrace as a major opportunity to consolidate our tools,” adds Summerlot. “Ultimately, Red Hat OpenShift is allowing us to scale up our transformation to drive our business into the next phase of its growth, and Dynatrace gives us the confidence we need to do that without fear.”