SimplePractice decreases total build time by 15-20% & CI Costs by 25%
😔 Before Semaphore:
- ⛔️️ CI/CD feedback loop speed was insufficient
- ⛔️ Lack of flexibility in building fully configurable deployment pipelines
😄 After adopting Semaphore:
- ✅ Decreased total build time by around 20%
- ✅ Applied a fully configurable build/deploy pipeline
Discover what Semaphore can do for your team 🧑💻
The Challenge
SimplePractice was looking for a platform that supports parallelism and the ability to manually deploy a particular branch to a particular server with a 100% configurable build/deploy pipeline.
They were also looking for ways to optimize and decrease their build time since long feedback loops are frustrating for the development team.
As a part of this quest for optimization and speed, they started using parallel_tests Ruby gem for a year or so before they discovered Semaphore Boosters.
The Solution
Their main challenge with the parallel_tests gem they had was that it was tricky to set up efficient balancing with it. However, when they discovered Semaphore Boosters, one of the obvious benefits was that they didn’t have to worry about setting anything up and the parallel test balanced pretty neatly with zero configuration.
“Semaphore is a pretty intuitive platform that has all the features you might need (manual deploys!) which allows for easy parallel test workers setup, so one has fewer things to set up and maintain down the road.”
Dmitry Krasnoukhov, Engineering Lead at SimplePractice
The Results
Semaphore Boosters decreased total build time by around 15-20% comparing to using parallel_tests in “group by file size” mode. Since the development team has been already using parallel testing it was a very nice surprise to see that it can be done even more efficiently with Semaphore Boosters.
“I can definitely say that shorter build times lead to better time utilization, which means we can ship more stuff faster!
Dmitry Krasnoukhov, Engineering Lead at SimplePractice
SimplePractice is a platform for health and wellness professionals. It allows their customers to manage all aspects of their business, such as scheduling appointments with clients, writing documentation for them, bill clients with credit cards and insurance, etc.
www.simplepractice.com 
Industry
Healthcare
Engineering team
20+ developers
Stack
Ruby on Rails
Ember.js
React
More customer stories
“It’s way faster and we just pay Semaphore for the number of build seconds we actually use. As we’ve spent a bit of time optimizing our build speed, each build costs about 10 cents.”
Conrad Irwin
CTO / Co-Founder
“Semaphore allows us to build anywhere from two to twenty branches in parallel, each one in a threaded environment. We had thousands of tests that were running for a really long time and with Semaphore we got the build to run in under 20 minutes.”
Artem Lypiy
QA Lead at 500px
“We were using Jenkins to build the old system, and it was hard to maintain and quite painful. We looked at other hosted CI services, but they were very unreliable. When we found Semaphore, we got our application up and running pretty quickly. We now use it for all projects.”
Lukas Oberhuber
CTO at Simply Business