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.
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.
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.
