The Customer

Verizon Connect provide technology that helps organizations monitor and optimize vehicles, drivers, and assets. Their platform integrates GPS tracking, safety monitoring, AI video, compliance tools, maintenance features, and analytics to help businesses operate safer, greener, and more efficiently.

Operating with over 3,500 employees across 18 countries, their platform supports millions of vehicles globally, across industries, delivering technology that gives businesses deep visibility into their mobile assets, workers, and operations.

The Challenge

A major push to modernize and migrate workloads to AWS accelerated the pace of change at Verizon Connect and expanded the mix of technologies in play. Between 2018 and 2021 they migrated around 500TB of data from on-prem to AWS, and their technology stack expanded from four to ten different technologies.

This rapid growth created several critical issues, as James and David explained:

• Fragmented tooling: Different teams used various source control systems and deployment approaches. Ranging from high automation, to manual scripts stored in wikis and emails.
• Organizational complexity: Teams were spread across global time zones (including New Zealand, USA, Europe, and India) creating difficulties for cross team collaboration.
• Skill silos: Engineers were often locked into specific platform patterns, making it hard to move staff between technologies like SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
• Manual bottlenecks: Manual and ‘tedious’ deployments that often required out-of-hours work and lacked repeatability.

As James Donnelly, Associate Director, explains “It’s a problem arising from having a successful company with a rapid growth rate. Not because engineering teams were doing anything wrong; we just needed to shift technology to meet customer demand.”

The Solution

As James outlined, he and Principal Database Developer David Murphy sought a “North Star” for standardization, “Standardization would be king, the one real ring to rule them all.”

Key components of their new CI/CD pipeline
The team utilized Redgate Flyway to build a standardized CI/CD pipeline that included:

• Version control: All code is pulled directly from source control.
• Ephemeral environments: Databases are spun up as Docker containers from controlled images for testing.
• Automated testing: Unit tests are run automatically during the build process.
• Consistent releases: Packages are handed to Octopus Deploy for production release.

The impact wasn’t just speed, it was confidence. Instead of pushing changes into shared environments and hoping for the best, developers could validate builds in isolation, with consistent tooling and predictable results. “The culture shift was key. You have to build trust between engineering teams before you hand them the keys to the car,” said James.

The need to move from from Community to Commercial 

To scale globally, Verizon Connect transitioned from the Community to the commercial Redgate Flyway edition to gain:

• Enterprise support: Official SLAs if issues arise.
• Legacy support: Coverage for older database versions not supported by the community edition.

The Results

Adoption of Redgate Flyway, and the shift to the standardized model provided immediate relief to the engineering and support teams at Verizon Connect. They knew that if it deployed successfully through Redgate Flyway once, it could be reliably repeated elsewhere in a standardized way. “We could do something once, deploy it once, and then it would deploy everywhere after that,” explained David.

The results gave leadership a clear view of the operational value:

• Operational support requests reduced by 90%
• Change-related incidents reduced by 30-40%
• Annual volume of database changes increased by over 1,000

Redgate Flyway enabled the teams to achieve the core goals of their ‘North Star’, by providing standardization across MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server, whether hosted on-prem or in AWS.  As David explained, “Flyway encourages consistency across deployments. Once you have something that’s working for one technology, why not just use that for the other one? It made managing a diverse database estate across all of our relational database repositories in MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server so much simpler.”

Key benefits of Redgate Flyway

• Increased confidence: Developers can now validate builds locally using the same version of Redgate Flyway that runs in the CI pipeline and production, ensuring ‘if it works on the laptop, it works in production’.
• Global portability: Standardized folder layouts and naming conventions allow developers to jump between different engine types, and teams easily.
• Visibility: Unlike previous state-based tools, Redgate Flyway shows pending changes before they are run, preventing surprises in production.

As James concluded, “90% of our operational support requests are gone. We still help with code reviews and operational change reviews to make sure that they’re not going to break production, but we now experience stable, faster, more frequent database release cycles with Flyway. It’s given us that crucial foundation we needed to scale to increasing business demand.”