EY teams turn to Microsoft for automation solution that speeds up processes, saves money

EY had an objective: transition their legacy value-added tax (VAT) application to a web-based, big data solution with a fully automated deployment pipeline. This would require re-architecting its back-end technology flow using a Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB) to automate the VAT Web Application on the developer operations or DevOps side. To learn more about the VAT Web Application, see the companion story (EY teams build a VAT web application to increase efficiency, business value in tax return data). 

The path to the new automation framework began with Porter, an open-source command-line installer tool that produces a structured manifest allowing for dependencies on reusable bundles. 

EY teams used it to combine different Azure components infrastructure into a single application bundle, or CNAB. CNAB is an open-source packaging and distribution specification built on Porter that allows EY teams to bundle application components into a single installable file. This reduces the complexity of dependency management and allows EY teams to reduce the operational overhead of managing its hundreds of applications. 

“This is a reusable VAT bundle we can use on our global tax platform,” says Wojciech Laskowski, Assistant Director, Low-Code Services, EY Technology. 

Finding the right solution 

Prior to using CNAB, EY teams were using a two-phased automation approach. In the provisioning phase, EY teams used multiple pipelines to provision Microsoft Azure components and Microsoft Dataverse environments. EY teams were provisioning Azure Functions, Azure Key Vaults, Azure Databricks, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Power Apps capacities and workspaces. 

In the deployment phase, EY teams made incremental deployments of each of their multiple pipelines. This meant deployments could take one to two days for just a handful of engagement environments—a lot to maintain and trigger, adding considerable time to the process. The deployment performance was slower than how EY teams wanted, and the limited scalability didn’t align with new engagement goals. 

Microsoft consulted with EY teams with a solution to upgrade the automation. EY teams leveraged a solution to bundle all the provisioning and deployment components and pipelines into one container using two key tools: Porter and Playwright, with which EY teams were able to automate previously manual steps, including creating connectors in Dataverse. 

In Porter, everything is stitched together. EY professionals use one command line to provision new components or multiple instances of the VAT Web Application. Playwright offers automation using a single API and uses a command line.

For EY, it’s “a hyper-scaling solution—a DevOps and complexity-reduction play for us,” says Ken Priyadarshi, EY Global Chief Architect for EY Technology. 

Creating more flexibility 

The older method required deep operational knowledge to deploy from one environment to another and to provision a new application instance. Everyone involved needed to know all the settings and credentials that were stored in multiple places, including Azure libraries, Azure Key Vaults, and even in documents on Microsoft Teams. 

Today, with CNAB, EY teams have one deployment file, one package, and a single artifact to deploy the 12 Azure services. Manual steps have been automated, including creating connectors in Dataverse. EY teams also use Azure SQL Reporting, so they require less operational knowledge to deploy an application or make any changes going forward to upgrade higher environments. 

“Everything is stored as code, so we are able to modify based on our need in our testing or production environment,” says Laskowski. “We can deploy faster for our clients. It’s a single point to deploy and configure complete instances right out of our application.”

Reusability is key

Reusability is one of the most important strategic initiatives in EY technology today. The solution had to answer the following: “How do we essentially bundle an entire application into a packet of code that we can reuse over and over again?” says Priyadarshi. 

With CNAB, EY teams packaged the entire application into a container bundle that when clicked—like an executable—spins the infrastructure on the cloud for the user. The more EY teams reuse container bundles, the more productivity the team gets because it’s not reinventing technology. 

“This is a game-changer for us,” says Laskowski. EY teams can now provision new and complex app instances in a few hours instead of waiting for days. This is a tremendous difference to how EY teams were running deployments even six months ago. The operational impact of now having the ability to provision thousands of instances at the push of a button is potentially in the millions. 

“It used to take a day for the dev team to roll out one to two environments. We’ve gone from that to the ability to parallelize our deployment pipeline to target thousands of instances overnight at the push of a button. The potential cost savings are significant given the scale we're talking about,” says Priyadarshi. 

What’s next in the EY organization’s data transformation journey?

The EY organization continues to make continuous improvements to its technology architecture. It’s looking at scaling the solution to shorten the provisioning cycle of VAT instances even further to 1 to 1.5 hours (from the current new state of 2 to 3 hours).