Case Study: How Beck's Hybrids Improved Reliability with Atlas
"I rely on Atlas because I know it works and it gets the job done."
– Hicaro Adriano, Principal Software Engineer, Beck's Hybrids
Company Background
Founded in 1937, Beck's Hybrids appreciates the farmers who have helped them grow to become the largest family-owned retail seed company and third-largest seed brand in the United States. This position gives Beck's access to the best genetics and trait technologies from suppliers worldwide. Beck's strives to provide all customers with the tools, support, and resources they need to succeed.
The Obstacle: Unreliable Migrations
The Beck's Hybrids IT department began with a few engineers managing mainframes. Over the years, the development team has grown in an effort to provide customers and internal users with various applications that help power all aspects of the business. These systems include "FARMServer®", a precision farming platform that helps farmers make decisions based on optimal planting windows and growth stage modeling.
FARMServer is a complex, Microsoft SQL Server-based application that has grown to include a wide range of features and functionalities. Its codebase heavily utilizes stored procedures, views, and custom types to handle the intricate logic required for precision farming.
Beck's has traditionally developed its technologies in-house, and that includes their schema management system for these applications. Their system was a semi-automatic process that required manually written migrations, which can be quite fragile.
Their process required developers to manually track which revisions had been applied, carefully compare that to the current state in production, and then apply the remaining changes one-by-one - "hoping they wouldn’t fail." With no batch transactions or safety mechanisms in place, even a small mistake often left production in an inconsistent state.