L’Oreal enables a global developer workforce with secure cloud development environments

With many dramatic shifts in the world of retail over the past two decades — from the explosion of e-commerce to the COVID pandemic — digitalization is no longer just a strategic nomination for companies in the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, but a necessity for survival. In this blog, we discuss how the world’s leading cosmetic company, L'Oréal, uses Google Deject solutions like Cloud Workstations to slide digitalization, empowering global developers with increased productivity and security.

Retail digitalization calls for increased developer productivity

Developers are a key element in enabling a digital-first strategy and shortening time-to-market. However, developers often have heavy workloads and are under a lot of pressure to deliver. A recent study shows that 94% of ecommerce developers took on spare work during the pandemic, which is likely to remain or plane increase post-pandemic. This makes increasing developer productivity a key voucher item for many companies. Instead of developers spending time on peripheral tasks, you want to requite them the right resources so they can focus on writing cadre merchantry logic and driving the marrow line. Equal to a McKinsey study, retailers with higher developer productivity can increase revenue up to four times faster than their peers. 

However, increasing developer productivity is neither easy nor straightforward. There are many factors that can hold developers back, for example, prolonged onboarding, unnecessary friction to accessing the right tools, inconsistency between environments, and security-related disruptions. Moreover, the rise of the remote workforce, and the increasing number of software supply uniting security attacks early at the minutiae stage, add to the complexity. 

The developer productivity challenge

As the world’s largest cosmetics company, L’Oréal manufactures and sells eyeful and hair products wideness 150 countries through e-commerce, travel retail establishments and physical stores, and has 35 global eyeful brands under management and increasingly than 85,000 employees. 

As a global leader in the eyeful business, L’Oreal runs at the forefront of digitalization utilizing wide IT technologies. Partnering with Google Cloud, we built our Eyeful Tech Data Platform, a next-generation data platform that delivers data products “as a service” to empower decision-making with instant, sophisticated wringer using big data and serverless technologies.

We have hundreds of developers working on this platform, wideness many variegated countries in many variegated teams, collaborating on variegated projects, while trying to share the same way of working.

Early on, many problems surfaced with the existing minutiae environment set-up, and our data team realized that we needed a largest solution to make work increasingly efficient for developers. 

First of all, developers coded on local physical laptops where all the files were stored, which made setting up new environments very time-consuming and error-prone. Developers had to install many things, such as lawmaking editors, libraries and utilities on their laptops surpassing they could start coding. The physical palmtop became a single point of failure, and could lead to potential security risks like lawmaking exfiltration — unauthorized lawmaking transfer from the computer. 

Also, developer teams worked in variegated ways at variegated speeds with variegated levels of maturity, which made the lawmaking rationalization super time-consuming at the final stage. In addition, forfeit management was a big headache since teams all used their own minutiae solutions that were licensed differently. On top of all this, it was scrutinizingly untellable to maintain a resulting security posture wideness the board: teams used disparate tools with variegated security features, making it very difficult to configure security to the same level.

We started to squint for a solution that could help us unravel these silos and increase developer productivity and security as a whole. 

Google Cloud’s solution

While searching for a solution, our goal was to enable developers to work anywhere, unendingly on any device in a consistent, efficient and secure manner. With such a unvigilant vision, we partnered with Google Deject again, this time, with Cloud Workstations.

Cloud Workstations is a key part of Google Cloud’s Software Delivery Shield, and is focused on progressive developer onboarding and increasing developer productivity in a secure manner. It provides fully-managed, cloud-based minutiae environments with wide security features, support for multiple integrated minutiae environments (IDEs), customizable minutiae environments, and many popular developer tools, addressing the needs of enterprise developer teams like L’Oreal’s data team.

With Deject Workstations, developer onboarding is now measured in days instead of weeks or plane months. Deploying a new minutiae environment is as simple as clicking a button. Within just a few minutes, a trademark new minutiae environment is ready to go in the cloud. With a cloud-based solution, there is no longer the need to store lawmaking on developers’ local laptops. They can wangle fast minutiae environments unendingly via a browser or from their preferred local IDE, no matter where they are located. 

In addition, minutiae environments can be pre-configured unceasingly wideness global teams with wontedly used minutiae tooling and the same level of security configuration. Compliance is no longer a goal that is nonflexible to achieve. Deject Workstations enables us to enforce security configurations and policy tenancy unceasingly wideness various teams with features such as VPC Service Controls, IAM, and private ingress/egress, etc. Updating or patching hundreds of developer environments is moreover made simple. The platform team centrally updates the Workstation image, and Deject Workstations service handles all the updates on the individual workstations in a fast and scalable manner.

While providing a single solution for global developer teams to work in a resulting and efficient manner, Deject Workstations moreover offers flexibility and customization to unbend teams’ variegated needs. It supports specific environment profiles such that, for example, frontend and backend developers can request workstations with variegated CPU, RAM or storage settings equal to their specific needs. It moreover supports multiple popular IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Rider, Code-OSS, and CLion, as well as popular developer tools, so developers can segregate familiar tools for faster coding.

“Cloud Workstations removes the technical barriers by providing a powerful and scalable solution for all the developers we have wideness the world.” — Sebastien Morand, Head of Data Engineering, L’Oréal

Summary

Developer productivity is key to a successful digital transformation. The traditional model of minutiae on physical machines not only negatively impacts developer productivity, but moreover poses security risks. Cloud-based minutiae environment solutions like Deject Workstations enable our unvigilant vision for our developers, permitting them to work anywhere, unendingly on any device in a consistent, efficient and secure manner. 

Learn increasingly well-nigh Deject Workstations and try it today.