SmartPension gains full control over its continuous integration process with Semaphore
😔 Before Semaphore:
- ⛔️️ 2x longer testing times
- ⛔️ Lack of flexibility in continuous integration processes
- ⛔️ No visibility into deployment process inefficiencies
😄 After adopting Semaphore:
- ✅ Average build time of the biggest project under 10 minutes ⏳
- ✅ Fully-customized CI process based on its needs
- ✅ Can now spot opportunities for deployment process improvements
Discover what Semaphore can do for your team 🧑💻
The Challenge
The engineering team at SmartPension depends on continuous integration (CI) to deploy its pension platform, but it needed more control and flexibility over the process. This was especially important when upgrading versions of NodeJS or Ruby, which caused costly and time-consuming code freezes.
The Solution
Because SmartPension’s engineering team is made up of 100 people across four countries, it needed to make a seamless switch to a CI platform with greater flexibility and control. With its testing process previously on Semaphore 1.0, the team decided to migrate to Semaphore 2.0, which offers more out-of-the-box solutions than its predecessor.
We have more control over the CI process and can speed things up. We can now see improvements to our deployment process, given all the features of Semaphore 2.0.
Sam Barton, CTO at SmartPension
The Semaphore Customer Success team helped SmartPension adopt the following features for faster CI/CD:
- ✔️ Docker-based agents let SmartPension run CI/CD in a perfectly customized environment composed of custom and community-made containers.
- ✔️ Complex pipelines as code let the team configure more parallel workloads than before, based on the build-dependencies-once principle.
- ✔️ Test Boosters to parallelize tests at scale with no effort.
- ✔️ Customizable caching: let SmartPension reuse dependencies from multiple package managers.
- ✔️ Secrets to store various API credentials.
It is more flexible than the previous version, it is faster, and you can bend it in many ways.
Sam Barton, CTO at SmartPension
The Results
By migrating its CI process to Semaphore 2.0, SmartPension slashed its build times by more than half, allowing it to release faster and more often. Thanks to Semaphore’s custom dashboards, SmartPension can more easily spot inefficient in its deployment processes and make changes that lead to a better pension platform for its customers.
We have full control over our CI environment and flow. Semaphore 2.0 allows us to modify and parallelise a lot of our build and testing flow.
Sam Barton, CTO at SmartPension
Smart Pension is a pensions and retirement technology business, delivering pensions technology platforms in partnership with other financial institutions, and running a defined contribution master trust pension scheme setup for employers to enrol employees in a workplace pension scheme.
www.smartpension.co.uk 
Industry
Pensions and retirement
Stack
Ruby
NodeJS
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