BetterUp runs its entire test suite in 8 mins with Semaphore

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

Which Semaphore features do you find the most useful?

Some of the key things that’s so unique to Semaphore are performance. We’ve explored other options just to ensure that we’re getting the best we possibly can be, and in most cases, I think in all cases, actually Semaphore’s performance has been by far the best. So whatever the magic, the secret sauce is working. One of the other things that is somewhat unique to Semaphore, I think we could probably find another solution, but so far has really served us really well, has been Semaphore’s, massive Parallelization. We have a really extensive test suite, and for us to be able to run the entire suite in, I think right now it’s about eight minutes, is pretty impressive. And so that’s been really a solid benefit from Semaphore.

In addition to those technological support pieces, I think Semaphore as a company has really helped us in ways where we either have reached out to Semaphore or even better, Semaphore has reached out to us and said, there’s opportunities to optimize here. And we’ve worked really closely together to find those kind of performance gains, and that’s been a really big benefit.

In addition to the performance, the cost side of things, we’re always looking for ways to ensure that we’re not wasting money or are balancing the cost of what we’re doing with the performance. And again, we’ve worked really closely with the Semaphore team, in both directions. We’ve reached out and Semaphore has reached out to us to identify opportunities to either run workloads on different size hosts, or use the cash effectively or whatever it may be, but always keeping tabs on that cost side of things.

How has Semaphore remained competitive compared to other CI/CD tools you’ve tested?

I’ll go back to how this all came up, and this happens every year for a number of different reasons. Internally, engineers across, especially since we have a number of different services and repos and ways we’re deploying things, folks kind of throw out the idea that, oh, maybe we should centralize on a certain tool. And GitHub Actions comes up all the time. We use it for all sorts of different workflows on other things. And so inevitably every year we look at what would it be like if we ran our Monolith CI on GitHub Actions, and every year, at least that I’ve been here, we try it and the performance isn’t there, there’s other issues, and so we just end up not going that route.

Why would you recommend Semaphore as the CI/CD tool of choice?

I think just as a tool in general, it’s a great tool. If I was comparing CI tools with no other information, I think some before would probably still be pretty high on my list. But then you add in all the things we’ve talked about, support, pricing, willingness to work together as partners on the needs that we have around, in addition to CI, so visibility and performance and all those kinds of things. I think it’s just been an exceptional experience. I’ll also say, and it’s kind of related, but as we mature as a company and we build new features and functionality internally for our engineering teams, one of the really cool things we’re working on ephemeral instances of our applications, we could spin up them on demand, and we’ve worked with Semaphore team to identify opportunities to use the Semaphore platform to make that a better experience for our engineers.

BetterUp is the first Human Transformation Platform that scales whole-person behavior change, integrating into your flow of work to boost organizational performance and measurably impact key business outcomes. 

Industry

Corporate Training, Human Resources, Personal Development

Headquarters

San Francisco, California, United States

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