In 2017 Columbia Sportswear decided to be a “Cloud First” organization and we decided to skip over IaaS altogether. By focusing on Serverless componentry we’d be more transformational, save money, and spend more time focused on our mission.

Along the way, we wrote an abstraction layer, influenced various Microsoft Product Groups to add management features, and enabled our developers to use the portal (no easy task when most demos show the portal) for complex integrations (Function Apps, Web Apps, Service Bus, API Management, Event Grid, Storage Queues, Cosmos Db, Logic Apps, Azure Data Lake Store, Databricks, etc.)

Even though Columbia’s pipelines are oriented towards continuous delivery of Serverless, many of our aspirations/design was heavily influenced by Capital One’s software cleanroom.