Indeed, a job search and recruitment company, built Indeed Assessments to help businesses better evaluate candidates’ on-the-job skills. Using data models that include hundreds of professionally-created assessment modules, Indeed Assessments enables businesses to receive feedback on job seekers’ abilities within their application. Ultimately, Indeed Assessment’s goal is to connect hiring managers with the best candidates fast.
The Challenge
Indeed Assessment’s team had a positive experience using the Semaphore’s first-generation CI/CD product, but it was ready to reduce the time from commit to deploy even further. This is especially important as the team plans to move to Kubernetes soon, so their next platform needed a proven track record of deploying Docker containers.
While the team had experience using CI/CD platforms like CircleCI and Jenkins, Indeed Assessments needed a more powerful platform that would decrease their average build time of 25 to 30 minutes. The team also experienced flaky test failures 25% of the time, causing some code versions to require more than one build cycle.
The Solution
For Indeed Assessments, Semaphore 2.0 was a natural choice for improving their CI/CD pipelines, especially considering the team’s move to a containerized strategy with Kubernetes. And because they were already on Semaphore Classic, the migration was simple and streamlined.
The Semaphore Customer Success team helped Indeed Assessments adopt the following features for faster CI/CD:
- Docker-based agents let IndeedAssessments run CI/CD in a perfectly customized environment.
- Semaphore Docker Registry made time to pull container images faster and an order of magnitude cheaper compared to using traditional cloud registries.
- Complex pipelines as code let the team configure more parallel workloads than before, based on the build-binary-once principle.
The team has also found Semaphore’s built-in artifact store useful for storing build logs and screenshots of test cases.
The Results
After migrating to Semaphore 2.0, Indeed Assessments cut their average build time by more than half and hit their goal of builds under 10 minutes. Before the switch, the team averaged two to three deployments a day, but they now deploy anywhere from four to 10 times a day. In addition to 3x faster build times, Indeed Assessments has experienced a 10x decrease in flaky test failures, further speeding up their development process as a whole.
