charity: water finds Semaphore to be the perfect balance of speed, stability, and an elegant UI

  • ⛔️️ Intermittent failures and instability of the CI/CD cycle
  • ⛔️ 1+ hour CI/CD runtime
  • ✅ Solid and stable performance of the CI/CD cycle
  • ✅ 8 minutes CI/CD runtime

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The Challenge

The test suite for charity: water’s biggest application is large, so when making bigger changes to the codebase, pushing to CI is a must to validate that everything is working.

While using a competitor’s solution the team started having intermittent failures that were beyond their control. It seemed that was due to their current CI/CD tool provider’s instability with VM images.

The Solution

While testing other solutions the engineering team at charity: water found out that Semaphore has been extremely solid. They can always trust that when something in their CI pipeline is not working it’s something they did wrong.

Additionally, they’ve found Semaphore CI boxes to be extremely performant, which allowed them to parallelize the test suite on a single box as well as across boxes.

They also value the simplicity that Semaphore provides both in its clean UI and the solid and versatile platform images that are constantly being updated and maintained.

The Results

The test suite of their largest application would take 1+ hour to run with a single RSpec process locally but thanks to Semaphore they’ve been able to cut that runtime down to about 8 minutes.

Industry

Non-profit

Stack

Ruby on Rails

Sinatra

Sidekiq

Postgres

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