How Digitas Standardized Application Deployment by Using Plural

I recently sat down with Ean Garcia-Rollings, an SVP of Technology at Digitas, the connected marketing agency that delivers better connections through Media-Fueled Creativity and data, insights, strategy, and innovative cross-channel executions. The 5,000-person company works with clients like Sephora, Crocs, and Delta Air Lines.

Ean has been with Digitas for over 22 years and oversees data engineering across a handful of marketing agency clients.

“I have been with Digitas for a while now and worn different hats. One of them being DevOps and [now] data engineering has definitely been a growing need for our company over the last two decades,” he said.

Nowadays, data is precious for marketing teams, who depend on it to optimize campaigns and ensure they are not overspending to acquire customers.

For Ean, standardizing a way to deploy all the applications a client might need to ingest, store and analyze that data was high up on his list of priorities.

Digitas chose Plural for standardizing app deployment on K8s

Ean said the process varies on a client-by-client basis, but identified these as the three most common options clients choose.

1. Clients have their own data stacks and run them in their own environments.
2. Digitas and the client utilize a shared environment where the client owns the stack, and Digitas runs the data stack on behalf of the client.
3. Digitas sets up brand new data stacks for their clients on separate Kubernetes clusters and runs separate processes that are later all passed back to the client.

The third option listed above is the most popular one that most clients choose. However, it’s a manual process for the DevOps team at Digitas.

When onboarding a new client, they have to:

• Spin up a brand new K8s environment for the particular client
• Configure everything to ensure it is running smoothly (usually involves writing custom Terraform scripts)
• Ensure all applications are good to go for production

Rather than continuing to do this manual process themselves, Ean’s team chose Plural to help them deploy open-source applications on Kubernetes.

“It was a lot easier to have a standardized process using Plural that already standardized these things to bootstrap the cluster and build upon that,” said Ean. “Plural allowed us to not have to reinvent the wheel.”

The Future of Plural at Digitas

When the DevOps team spins up a Kubernetes cluster for their clients, they are typically deploying a data stack on their behalf. While the data stack varies on a client-by-client basis, the team is a big fan of utilizing open-source software wherever it makes sense.

Currently, Digitas deploys Airbyte and Argo CD for their clients with Plural. In the future, they plan on using Plural to deploy n8n and explore a data visualization layer, such as Apache Superset or Metabase.

“We got value right away because Plural made it so easy to get our cluster up and running in one click,” said Ean. “Plural creates an optimal setup to install these applications on Kubernetes and Postgres databases that back each one. Having all of the batteries included is a win for me and the team.”

Getting started with Plural

Are you looking to deploy open-source applications on Kubernetes without having to reinvent the wheel?

If you are interested in learning more about how Plural works and how we can help your engineering team deploy open-source applications in a cloud production environment, reach out to me and the rest of the team over at Plural.

Check out our GitHub and follow our documentation to get up and running.

And, join us on our Discord channel for questions, discussions, and to meet the rest of the community.