Client story FTD Cuts Deployment Times to Minutes With Google Cloud CI/CD Pipelines
Client
Founded in 1910 by 10 visionary florists, FTD is a leader in the floral and gifting industry with a vast network. For over a century, the company has been a trusted name for life's most meaningful moments.
Industry: Retail
Challenge
FTD struggled with a complex Jenkins environment that slowed down their continued modernization journey of microservices.
Outcomes
FTD slashed deployment times from hours to less than 60 minutes for the Mercury Solutions service, automated manual processes, and built reusable pipeline patterns for future growth.
Solutions: Google Cloud
FTD faced a complex, aging Jenkins setup that hindered their speed to market. Insight helped FTD transition to a modern, automated CI/CD pipeline, slashing deployment times from hours to less than 60 minutes, giving application teams more ownership and better security.
- Slashed deployment times from hours to minutes for the Mercury Solutions application
- Automated 100% of manual deployment tasks for the Mercury Solutions application
- Built reusable templates for future apps
Insight has a very collaborative and understanding team that brought a breadth of knowledge and patience to FTD’s projects. They truly understood our needs, the problems, the budget, the timeframe, and how to use the Devshop model to accommodate them. These were relatively short engagements with complex problems to solve. It was very positive how quickly Insight was able to overcome challenges or pivot to a new solution in hours versus taking days or weeks.”
Aaron Wolfhope,
Senior Manager, Cloud Platforms and SRE,
FTD
Innovating the floral industry through technology
FTD leads the way in flower delivery and florist networks by constantly looking for better ways to serve their members. As the company continues their modernization journey, Steve Ridley, VP of Infrastructure at FTD, seeks to give developers better technology to do their jobs. This vision led FTD to rethink how they build and ship software to maintain their spot as a top gift provider.
The challenge: Overcoming complex legacy pipelines
FTD dealt with a homegrown Jenkins environment that slowed down their technical teams. This setup didn’t fully support FTD’s need for agility, which meant developers often met resistance when they wanted to use new features.
“Our developers, tech leads, and project sponsors all say our Jenkins environment is very complex and customized,” says Aaron Wolfhope, Senior Manager, Cloud Platforms and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at FTD. “It allows for some flexibility and changes, however, we wanted to make changes that would really empower our development teams. They wanted to use new features and functionalities on their journey to microservices. There was just a lack of functionality in our current Jenkins setup.”
The manual nature of the old system caused significant bottlenecks. For the Mercury Solutions service, deployments took hours and required both a DevOps resource and multiple developers to finish. Issues often appeared very late in the process, which meant the team spent too much time toiling on rework rather than creating new features. FTD needed to shift to the left in the software development life cycle (SDLC) to find bugs earlier and give their developers more self-service capabilities.
The solution: Building a modern DevOps foundation
Insight helped FTD through a Devshop model that gave them access to a cloud architect and cloud infrastructure engineers. The team worked on two major areas: the Fulfillment Network Service messaging platform and the Mercury Solutions service. Insight helped FTD move away from the legacy Jenkins shared libraries by modernizing their pipelines, resulting in a simpler, leaner setup.
“From a technology perspective, it really helped us to have an Insight cloud architect,” says Wolfhope. “He supported both projects with everything from design and problem-solving to guiding the developers and engineers. It was extremely important to have that architecture role as a part of both engagements to help the team develop these solutions and give them options.”
They built new standardized Helm and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) patterns that let developers manage their own configurations. This new structure uses reusable Jenkins templates, so FTD can apply the same high standards to any new application they build. Throughout the project, FTD and Insight held daily huddles to stay aligned and unblock technical hurdles quickly.
The outcome: Achieving faster results and better security
This modernization effort enhanced FTD’s CI/CD capabilities, moving the infrastructure department into a more strategic role providing developers with increased self-service to operate their applications.
“One of the big benefits of these projects was increased agility in feature delivery and greater ownership of application operations by the teams who know those applications best,” says Ridley. “DevOps really comes down to enablement. One of our key goals was to eliminate the friction between the development and infrastructure teams and let them take ownership of the applications.”
Quantifiable benefits
- Slashed deployment time for the Mercury Solutions service from several hours to less than 60 minutes
- Moved to a fully automated process for the Mercury Solutions service from 100% manual deployments
- Created advanced pipeline patterns that FTD will reuse for subsequent service migrations
Qualitative improvements
- Bolstered developer ownership by giving teams greater control over configuration, delivery, and operation of their applications
- Mitigated risk of unauthorized access and damage to systems and data through least privilege access
- Improved security by finding and removing service accounts with Google Cloud’s Policy Intelligence and Recommender AI tools, which can help identify and mitigate service account security issues
Future outlook
The success of the Fulfillment Network Service and Mercury Solutions projects gives FTD blueprints for future pipeline work. They have already started a third journey to migrate another existing application to these new patterns. This DevOps foundation helps FTD prepare for new trends, including the use of AI, as they continue to grow.
“We really think of DevOps as a culture,” says Ridley. “Part of that culture is the saying, ‘You build it, you run it.’ That’s the culture we’re trying to move to so that the application teams can operate their own applications in production more efficiently. We’re here to provide technologies that help them do that effectively.”
This DevOps mindset ensures that FTD stays agile and ready to meet shifting market demands for years to come.
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By Insight Editor / 12 Jun 2026 / Topics: DevOps
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