CVS Health's journey from legacy tools to seamless developer experience | GitHub

Quick Overview

CVS Health successfully migrated over 150,000 repositories and thousands of CI/CD pipelines from nine legacy tools into GitHub Enterprise Managed Users (EMU) and GitHub Actions, achieving 100% migration by Q2-Q3 2027, which significantly reduced cognitive load and operational burden for its 10,000+ developers.

Key Points: CVS Health undertook the 'Repo Rally' to transform the Developer Experience (DevEx) for over 10,000 developers by migrating to a unified GitHub platform. The migration involved over 150,000+ repositories and thousands of pipelines, moving from nine different CI/CD tools into GitHub Actions. The execution followed a phased approach, starting with 15% completion in Q4 2020 (Discovery/Planning) and culminating in 100% migration by Q2-Q3 2021 (Migrate GitLab Repos using GitHub CI/CD to GitHub Actions). Key challenges included a fragmented ecosystem, inconsistent workflows, manual communication, and the operational burden of maintaining legacy tooling. The solution involved developing an app to manage migrations, automating communication via event-driven emails, and implementing enhanced migration scripts with error handling and automated validations. The next phase focuses on AI-powered GitHub consolidation, leveraging GitHub Copilot and Agent Mode to automate the migration of 750+ templates and 50,000+ jobs, cutting migration time and manual overhead. The ultimate goal is empowering teams for innovation by eliminating repetitive tasks and operational drag, allowing developers to focus on strategic innovation and value creation.

Context: Jim Beyers, VP of Developer Experience at CVS Health, introduced the presentation by outlining the company's mission to be the leading and most trusted healthcare provider, emphasizing that their developer experience transformation is crucial for supporting this mission across their diverse businesses (Health Care Benefits, Health Services, Pharmacy and Consumer Wellness). He detailed the initial challenges of a fragmented developer ecosystem involving over ten different CI/CD tools, which created significant overhead and slowed down cross-team collaboration and innovation.