Nike: store-server upgrades from 6-8 hours to about 3, eight at a time
600+ engineering hours a year saved with self-service CI/CD and release automation
- Client
- Nike, retail engineering
- Scale
- 900+ stores
- Stack
- Jenkins, AWS, Azure, Python, Groovy, Ansible, Bash, Ruby, Jamf
- Role
- Platform engineer
- Duration
- 3.5 years, across several projects
The situation
Nike's retail engineering teams ship software that has to work across 900+ stores. Store-server upgrades ran by hand across five teams: 6 to 8 hours per server, and only 2 servers could be upgraded safely at the same time. Releases depended on hand-offs, manual checks and one-off scripts, which slowed delivery and caused avoidable incidents.
Before and after
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Store-server upgrade, per server | 6 to 8 hours | about 3 hours |
| Servers upgraded safely at the same time | 2 | 8 |
| Teams involved in an upgrade | 5, by hand | 1 self-service pipeline |
| Mobile app and bot provisioning | 45 minutes of hands-on work | about 3 minutes |
| Quarterly test-driver update | about 2 hours | under a minute |
| Recurring device-profile repair, several times a week | by hand | one click |
| Engineering time on this work | 600+ hours a year back |
#store-upgrades
Upgrade pipeline10:14
Store-server upgrade
- Current stage
- E2E validation
- Owned by
- Store systems
Stage history
All passed
- Setup Release engineering
- Pre-upgrade script execution Store systems
- Create SQL DB backup Database
- Perform server cutover Server platform
- 2a - Restore SQL DB Database
- 2b - Restore SQL DB - Update DB config Database
- Apply release Release engineering
- Run post-upgrade script Store systems
Self-service deployments to staging devices
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Test build to staging devices | 5 to 10 minutes by a release engineer | about 1.5 minutes, started by the developer |
| Hand-offs per deployment | 1, and the wait for it | none |
| Corporate app to UAT | 10 to 15 minutes by hand | about 3 minutes |
The decision they faced
Keep upgrading 900+ store servers with a manual checklist passed between five teams, or automate the upgrade into one pipeline.
What was built
Also delivered: Multiple high-priority vulnerabilities in Azure and AWS mitigated, and the Slack-to-Teams migration enabled, which cut annual license costs.
What it took from their team
Time from managers and engineers across QA, database, Windows, release and SRE: their existing scripts and know-how, reviews, and sign-off before each change reached production.
“Mateusz has made several key contributions that significantly reduced cost, complexity, and manual effort. His work consistently reflects a deep understanding of systems and a focus on automation and efficiency.”
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“As an engineer, I’ve seen how manual delivery work quietly drains time and reliability. I built Expeditious Software to remove bottlenecks, reduce operational toil, and deliver measurable improvements in speed and stability.”
