Cramo accelererates system integration deployment with Netlang
From manual deployments, to improved velocity and quality with continuous delivery.
Cramo is part of the Boels Group, together with Boels Rental and Riwal. As one of Europe’s leading rental providers, the Group supplies equipment, expertise, and smart-services to thousands of daily customers
Key takeaways
Cramo transitioned from a partially manual, internally built deployment tool to a fully automated CI/CD pipeline. This made builds more predictable, deployments traceable, and significantly streamlined the release process.
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While development deployments are fully automated, production releases require manual triggering. Combined with clustering and rolling updates, this approach maintains high operational stability without sacrificing governance or quality.
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Cramo didn’t replace its existing foundation (Git and Azure DevOps) but built on it. By extending current tools with Maven and pipeline automation, they achieved scalable, modern delivery without unnecessary disruption.
Background
Founded in 1953, Cramo is one of Europe’s leading full-service providers of machinery and equipment rental. Together with its parent company, Boels Rental, Cramo operates in seventeen countries, supporting both small and large businesses. With a strong commitment to sustainability and extensive experience in the wind energy sector, Cramo is a trusted partner for green energy projects, serving turbine manufacturers, developers, and subcontractors alike.
In Sweden, Cramo runs more than 90 depots and employs around 850 people nationwide. Its offering spans from short-term equipment rental to comprehensive, multi-year project solutions. With over 70 years of experience, Cramo delivers high-quality machinery and smart services that help customers across construction, manufacturing, and the public sector move their projects forward.
Challenges / problem
For Cramo, velocity and quality are core priorities, reflected in their customer promise: “The right equipment at the right time.” Their commitment extends beyond regular business hours, ensuring equipment is delivered whenever customers need it.
This operational mindset is mirrored in their IT landscape. In a fast-moving industry where requirements can change quickly; New integrations must be deployed rapidly, without compromising reliability or quality. This balance is necessary, in upholding their role as a partner you can trust.
Managing equipment, logistics, and customer relationships at this scale is complex. To streamline operations, Cramo leverages its own service portal and the SmartControl app, handling a large share of customer interactions digitally. These platforms support continuous, around-the-clock operations and facilitate critical customer data exchanges. From bookings and equipment management to shipment tracking, ensuring seamless service delivery across the organization.
The move to continuous delivery
In an earlier integration platform environment, the team at Cramo had developed its own internal deployment tool to manage builds and deployment. While effective at the time, the solution required some manual handling and operational oversight, highlighting the need for a more standardized and scalable approach.
When customers begin building novel tools to compensate for platform limitations, it signals a clear demand for more robust built-in capabilities. As Cramo continued to evolve its integration landscape, the opportunity emerged to modernize its delivery processes and fully embrace continuous integration and deployment.
When Netlang introduced support for using, publishing and deploying Maven artifacts, this goal became possible. Building on this foundation, Cramo developed a new pipeline architecture designed to fully support continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
Moving to a structured CI/CD model has given us
speed and control. We can deliver improvements faster while maintaining the stability our operations depend on
Peter Narup, Cramo
Starting Point
Transitioning from the internal tool to a fully structured CI/CD setup required redesigning existing flows, and establishing governance between development and production environments.
Another key consideration was operational stability during deployments. To address this, Cramo implemented clustering in their Netlang environments. This allows nodes to be updated one at a time while others continue running, enabling rolling releases without disrupting operations.
With source code already managed in Git through Azure DevOps, version control practices were well established. Using versioning in their favor, Cramo configured automated triggers connected to Azure Pipelines.
While Azure DevOps is their platform of choice, the setup itself is platform-agnostic — similar CI/CD workflows could be implemented using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or comparable tools.
Development Branch
Any new code pushed from a developers workspace to the development branch automatically triggers the Azure pipeline workflow. In the cloud, the pipeline builds an artifact. Then, using the compiled artifact is published to Cramo’s private repository in Netlang, after which, a rolling update of the server nodes are triggered via call to Netlang Rest API. Even being fully automated, the pipeline can also be triggered by developers manually when needed, providing flexibility during testing or validation.
Production Branch
Different behaviors were needed for the production environment. Here Cramo had to make a choice between automation and control. For the production environment, they opted for a controlled deployment process: Approved changes are merged into the production branch and deployed by manually triggering the pipeline. This approach ensures proper governance and oversight of live releases while maintaining a structured and predictable deployment process
Results and Outcomes
Today, Cramo operates with a modern CI/CD framework where manual deployment has been replaced with automated pipelines, which has significantly streamlined the release process. Builds are now predictable, deployments are traceable, and managed systematically through Maven artifacts.
Clustering has further strengthened reliability, updates can be deployed with minimal service impact. The ability to version and roll out changes incrementally has improved both control and confidence in production releases.
Takeaways
Cramo’s journey toward continuous integration and deployment demonstrates the value of building on existing strengths. With version control already established in Git and Azure DevOps, the transition was not about replacing foundations, but rather about using them to formalize and automate what had previously required manual effort.
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