Beauty That is More Than Skin Deep: How Grupo Boticário Future-Proofed with Crossplane & Upbound

Grupo Boticário

Grupo Boticário is a global, sustainable cosmetics company headquartered in Brazil. With over 4,000 stores worldwide, they are the second largest in Brazil, and fifteenth largest in the world.

Crossplane

Crossplane is an open source CNCF project that leverages the Kubernetes API to transform your cluster into a universal control plane. Crossplane enables platform teams to use Providers to install Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), extending the Kubernetes API with new kinds to provision, compose, and consume infrastructure from multiple vendors, without having to write any code.

The Problem

Like many large companies, Grupo Boticário built up a sprawling infrastructure stack over time, with different teams using different tools to solve the same problems over and over. Grupo Boticário’s small infrastructure team was servicing a large development team and one hundred product teams. This caused a huge backlog, which meant blocked and frustrated developers, waiting sometimes days or weeks to provision a simple database, challenges scaling infrastructure, and slow time to market. It became clear that, in order to continue to grow to meet future demand, Grupo Boticário would need to find new solutions. When they discovered Crossplane + Upbound, it was a thing of beauty!

The Solution (or Why Crossplane?)

Grupo Boticário wanted to efficiently scale their DevOps teams and infrastructure. They didn’t want their teams to have to spend time requesting AWS accounts and credentials to run their ArgoCD pipelines and spin up infrastructure. Grupo Boticário wanted a centralized, standardized, self-service platform for their developers to provision approved infrastructure. They wanted to enable developers to get what they needed easily, and to create applications and services with as little friction as possible.

Crossplane emerged as the clear winner in terms of innovation and ease of use. Crossplane gave Grupo Boticário the ability to have a set, repeatable, consistent pattern; now they can easily provision resources within their ArgoCD pipelines using GitHub Actions.

Why Upbound

Upbound is the creator of Crossplane and the industry’s first platform for building internal cloud platforms. Designed around control planes, Upbound offers a new way for building internal cloud platforms, purpose-built for your organization. Customers can build, deploy, manage, secure, and use their platforms all from a single point of control.

Upbound Product Value

• Official Providers. With Upbound’s Official Providers, you get stable, full coverage parity with cloud vendor APIs. All resource APIs are production ready, giving platform teams a stable foundation to build their Internal Cloud Platforms. No longer would Grupo Boticário have to worry about using alpha resources in production, or a missing AWS resource causing additional development work.
• Marketplace. Upbound’s Marketplace has the perfect solutions to build internal cloud platforms. This is where Grupo Boticário found Official Providers and featured configurations—custom blueprints and reference platforms to power their internal cloud platform.
• Flexibility. Grupo Boticário loves that Upbound runs anywhere, on-premises and on any cloud. It installs into any cluster and exposes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and a standard API across infrastructure and service providers, and integrates with a single Kubernetes cluster in EKS, AKS, GKE, ACK, PKS and multi-cluster managers such as Rancher and Anthos.

Upbound Customer Support and Customer Success

Upbound’s Customer Success team exists to deliver value to customers by engaging with them from the moment they sign on. Our regular alignment calls, private Slack channels, private GitHub repositories, and quarterly business reviews ensure we’re always in close communication, and that Upbound always has the correct context to help in the right ways, quickly. We provide architecture reviews, resource support, best practices, bespoke trainings, and setup and installation guidance. Why? We want to enable customers to swap their business pains with business value; to do everything they want to do with Upbound.

Grupo Boticário knew that with Upbound, they would see results quickly, and they would see results that grow and last over time.

Summary

Grupo Boticário built an efficient, scalable and future-proofed platform using Crossplane and Upbound combined with Github Actions, ArgoCD and Backstage. With this solution, Grupo Boticário are now doing a lot more, and doing it with less. They have fewer tools and fewer DevOps tickets; this has reduced costs and sped up time to market. Developers are happier, and the Platform team have reduced their security risks and increased efficiencies through better automation.

Want to know more?

To learn more and ask questions about Grupo Boticário’s Crossplane solution join our upcoming webinar with Grupo Boticário’s Head of Infrastructure, Márcio Ribeiro on November 10 at 8 AM PT. Márcio will give you an exclusive look at their current implementation and discusses why they chose Crossplane + Upbound over other possible solutions. Márcio will share real-time ROI metrics as the result of reducing deployment time from days to minutes. With Crossplane + Upbound, Grupo Boticário Boticario will never have to replatform again.

View the on-demand webinar that talks all about this!