A Fortune 500 consumer goods company reaches DORA’s top quartile with Shipyard ephemeral environments

Background

The customer is one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies. Its digital commerce organization builds the storefronts, commerce services and internal tools behind the company’s e-commerce business.

Several engineering teams share one Shipyard organization. Between them they have 23 applications set up in Shipyard, from the commerce engine’s front end to marketing and admin tools. Shipyard started with a handful of developers and has grown to 69 people.

Challenges

Several teams ship changes to the same commerce estate. Shared pre-production environments broke often. Changes queued behind QA and user sign-off, and too many defects reached production with new features.

Home-Built Tooling That Didn’t Hold Up

The team first built its own environment tooling. It didn’t hold up:

• It tied up dedicated DevOps engineers for more than six months and still had gaps.
• It needed hours of upkeep every week.
• Its environments didn’t scale to zero when idle, so costs kept climbing.
• It sat behind the VPN and was really a code review tool. Product managers, testers and other stakeholders couldn’t easily open it, so their review often waited for shared staging.

What Any Replacement Had to Fit

Any replacement also had to fit the way the team builds software:

• Container images live in a private Azure Container Registry, reached through a service principal over a private network path. Builds also need credentials for private packages.
• The Next.js front ends take environment-specific values at build time, so every environment needs its own build.
• Some features span several repositories. Branches have to line up across them, with mock and job-style services running alongside the application.

Solution

The applications were already containerized, so Shipyard fitted the existing delivery pipeline with minimal changes. The first project was onboarded and running within a day of starting setup, with no new hires.

An Environment for Every Pull Request

When a developer opens a pull request, Shipyard builds a full copy of the application from the team’s own definition. Every build in the last 30 days started from a git event, not a manual trigger.

What Each Environment Comes With

Each environment comes with what the team needed:

• Single sign-on and access controls, so product managers, testers and executives can open it without the VPN.
• Its own snapshot of test data, with logs flowing to Datadog.
• Private registry access through the customer’s service principal, build-time secrets for private dependencies, and per-environment values for each Next.js build.
• Support for monorepo and multi-repo applications, with mock and job-style services alongside, so reviewers see the complete change.

A Dedicated Cluster, Run by StackGen

StackGen provisions and operates a dedicated Kubernetes cluster for the customer in its Azure tenancy. No environment cap applies, so teams open as many environments as their work needs. Environments scale to zero when nobody is using them.

An environment on every pull request still impresses people the first time they see it. Product managers, testers and even executives review changes there, not just developers.

— Engineering Leader, Fortune 500 consumer goods company

Results

Top Band on All Four DORA Measures

More Teams Keep Adopting It

Shipyard has been part of the customer’s delivery workflow for years, and more teams keep adopting it:

• 69 organization members and 23 applications set up, up from a handful of developers at the start.
• More than 3,000 builds in a recent 30-day period, about 100 a day, from 49 active commit authors.
• 64 environments running at the same time.
• More than 120,000 builds to date.

Looking ahead

Shipyard is now part of StackGen. As AI writes more of the code that reaches review, every change needs somewhere real to run before it ships. Shipyard environments are already reachable by AI agents through the Shipyard MCP server.

StackGen is bringing Shipyard into its Autonomous Operations Factory, so a proposed change can prove itself in a real environment before it reaches production.