Simply Business reduced their CI built time from 30mins to 12mins after switching to F1 servers

In this video you’ll find the answers to these questions:

How was your performance improved since switching to F1 servers? do you find the most useful?

I think originally we were on E1 servers, which are slower. We were going through a lot of growth and we’re starting to really hit the limits of those servers and the plan that we were originally on. I believe it was just like we had a certain number of servers, and once we hit the max limit of those servers, essentially a queue would begin, and we were starting to see really long queues. I think our CI/CD wasn’t running until sometimes there would be queues as long as about an hour or more, which of course was slowing us down.

We started talking with Semaphore about switching over to their F1 servers and also transitioning to a on-demand plan, but we had to get that approved through finance. So thankfully Semaphore was incredible and really worked with us to figure out what it is that we needed. One of the things that they did was they gave us a trial period essentially with some of those servers, the F1 servers, which were much, much faster. And when we were trialing the F1 servers, we found that the CI build time reduced by almost half, I believe, which was pretty remarkable. I think originally we were looking about, I don’t know, 24, 25, 30-minute build times. That was reduced down to almost 12 minutes. It was bonkers how quick those servers are and the effects that we were able to see right away. So we were able to take those learnings to our finance department and justify why it made sense to switch to these servers. So that was huge.

By having these faster build times with no queue, it changed, it was a game changer. Essentially, we were able to push code, kick off a build, it would start within seconds, and it would be built right around the 10-minute mark. So instead of waiting for an hour to an hour and a half, we’re literally waiting 10 to 12 minutes tops, and so you’re able to jump right back in if there’s any issues and fix them. And having that really quick response time basically helps speed us all up and helps us stay in our flow and actually get the work done instead of having to stop and start and context switch.

How did switching to on-demand plan affect your costs?

Yes, it is more expensive to switch to the on-demand plan. However, the beauty of this is that Semaphore comes with built-in tools that help you monitor your costs and you can anticipate things increasing. So there’s a billing page where essentially you’re able to monitor how much you’re being billed over time. You’re able to identify which projects might be seeing sudden spikes, and that means that we’re able to actually narrow in and figure out, “Okay, are these spikes worthwhile? Are there things that we can change to make it more efficient?” And that sort of thing. And so the nice thing about it is that we’re actually able to monitor this in real time and make sure that we’re sticking within the budget that we have set for us.

Which Semaphore features do you find the most useful?

One of the ones that I remember being introduced that I was really impressed with was the flaky test feature. The flaky test feature has come in very handy for us because as I mentioned before, we went through a massive period of growth, and so you’re pushing code really fast. And of course we were writing tests, but we were finding that some tests seemed to be flaky, but of course it was happening so infrequently that it was really hard to narrow down which tests were actually the problem. The nice thing about the flaky test feature is that it made it really easy to identify where we were seeing those flaky tests. Everything was there being logged automatically for us and presented to us to be like, “Hey, these are the tests that don’t seem to be running consistently. There seems to be something flaky in this.” And so we were able to actually take a look at those tests and figure out what was wrong, make them more robust, make them less brittle, and have significantly fewer flaky tests.

The other thing that’s really nice about Semaphore actually is that you can see all of your builds in one place. So I can see all of the builds that I am currently running in one place, whereas something like GitHub for example, it’s basically the views are all project-based, so you’re constantly having to search everything down. Whereas I can literally just get a view of everything that is currently building that I have pushed and worked on, and it just makes it very, very easy. Part of what I love about Semaphore is that it is very developer-focused. It is built with a developer in mind and what would actually be useful, which is huge.

One of the features that I really loved that Semaphore introduced to us was they helped us optimize our setup by having our caching step at the start of the pipeline, which updates all the dependencies so that all the following jobs could just use that cache.

The fact that we can customize how it is that our CI runs, so for example, only running if there’s a PR present, allows us to essentially cut our costs by, I think something like 20% because we’re able to set things up so that certain apps only run in the case of a PR, while others just run on demand once there’s a commit present. So being able to have that customization and just being an easy on-off feature that we can switch is really nice.

How has your daily work life improved?

It has been a massive improvement in terms of my daily work life is, I know that when I deploy, my CI is going to be built within about 10 minutes, and it gives me the freedom and confidence to hit that merge button whenever I am ready without worrying that I’m going to end up babysitting a deploy for ages because I’m waiting for my CI to build. So that in and of itself is just a great feature.

How do you find Semaphore’s customer support?

The customer support is fantastic. We have a dedicated Slack channel that allows us to communicate directly with Semaphore folks. If we hit a problem, then we’re able to reach out and get a response pretty much immediately. And it’s nice because there’s no delay in our back and forth. We’re just immediately able to present the problem. They’re able to ask us questions to narrow down what we’re seeing, and then they’re able to immediately take a look and help us figure out together what the problem is and get us unstuck really fast.

Why would you recommend Semaphore to others?

The team at Semaphore is really willing to work with you and alongside you to help you figure out what it is you need and what services they can provide that will help support you and your developers. They’re very customer-focused and they’re very willing to work with your specific circumstances and help you figure out how it is that they can help you.

Simply Business is a business insurance broker that offers tailored business insurance quotes to its clients.

Industry

Finance, Insurance

Headquarters

Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)

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