SNCF Connect & Tech | Gatling Customer Story

Part I Introduction
Part II SNCF Connect & Tech's quest for a developer-friendly load testing tool
Part III How Gatling Enterprise Helps
Part IV Gatling Community Empowers Developers for Agile Load Testing at SNCF Connect & Tech

Part I Introduction

"We first had a dedicated load testing unit working with another load testing tool, but we moved to Gatling Enterprise for two reasons: lower price and project autonomy"

Pierre-Yves Gautier

Product Manager Observabilité

At a Glance

Lack of autonomy for developers with previous load testing tool
Migration of Infrastructure to the Cloud needed
Created a strong Community with Gatling to train developers to be more agile
Conducted Soak and Peak testing with Gatling Enterprise to evaluate performance and compare results
Successfully migrated to the Cloud with the help of hybrid AWS infrastructure
Currently, managing 120 terabytes of data per month
2.5+ million website visits daily
25+ million downloads of the SNCF Connect & Tech application

About SNCF Connect & Tech

SNCF Connect & Tech is France's leading digital and e-commerce division of SNCF Group in the mobility sector, bringing together digital skills to serve their customers. Drawing on the expertise of over 1,000 employees in France, SNCF Connect & Tech designs and implements the SNCF Group's digital customer solutions. Its ambition is to innovate to make sustainable mobility accessible to all.

The SNCF Group with 270,000 employees and 41.4 Billion euros of turnover in 2022 - offers a full range of mobility solutions across multiple business lines. SNCF manages 15,000 train departures and 10 million passengers daily in 3,000 stations across France.

Challenge

SNCF Connect & Tech efficiently manage large network traffic, but with the increasing number of sessions/second and constantly changing government policies for ticket management, managing network traffic efficiently and continuing to provide impeccable customer service became their priority.

Until 2018, with their previous load testing tool, the organization's developers had limited autonomy to manage their projects. Testers struggled with transferring performance-qualifying processes to the project teams, relied heavily on the tool, and struggled to manage their teams, backlogs, tests, etc.

The organization searched for a tool specializing in load testing for developers that provides autonomy, regularly checks the application's performance, and enables them to migrate part of their infrastructure to the cloud without performance issues and with lower costs.

Solution

In 2018, they deployed a self-hosted Gatling Enterprise integrated with Maven to test how the application behaved when many sessions/second were open during the sale of online tickets. For 300+ projects, they conducted soak tests to assess applications' stability and peak tests to evaluate applications’ behavior when faced with high traffic.

SNCF Connect & Tech commenced their infrastructure migration in 2020 with the help of hybrid AWS infrastructure. Further, they deployed resources to build a community of agile developers with Gatling to support their projects through this infrastructure migration process and completed the transition process in 2021.

Results

Gatling's Community within SNCF Connect & Tech created a knowledge base and boot camps around load testing. The community empowered 50+ developers to be more agile and autonomous. A trained team can script, launch, and run a simulation in less than three days. Also, the developers can now easily update test scenarios, generate several tests throughout the day, and implement an Application Programming Interface (API) for retrieving and comparing test results.

Today, SNCF Connect & Tech can successfully manage 120 terabytes of data per month with more than 2.5+ million website visits daily and 25+ million downloads of the SNCF Connect & Tech application, with low infrastructure costs.