CircleCI Training: A Practical Approach To Workflow Automation

CircleCI is set to revolutionize the way companies approach continuous integration, testing, and deployment. This has been said about a lot of CI/CD platforms before. However, it has never been more true than with CircleCI. To prove this, in this post we’re going to highlight five ways that CircleCI will improve your integration and deployment processes. A common theme you’ll notice throughout this read is how after automating software builds, testing, and deployment, business went up for these and other users of CircleCI.

What you’ll find below are several traceable case studies of companies that adopted CircleCI. After successful workflow automation, you should be able to find a practical use case for CircleCI based on testimonies from these companies.

Quicker and Effortless Parallelization

As is often the case when an application’s codebase grows, build and test cycles take longer to accomplish. Longer build and test cycles, however, could not be tolerated in the case of Belly, a marketing automation company that scales on a brand loyalty model built for its customers. As such, Belly took its nearly two-hours-long automated testing process and ran it with CircleCI’s parallelization feature. The results were a drastically less time-consuming testing process that took only eight minutes to complete. The smoother workflows meant quicker feedback and, ultimately, happier clients. How long does your build-test-patch-deploy iteration last? Find out how CircleCI’s alternative to Jenkins’ multithreading can speed up mission-critical tasks along your pipelines.

Run More Tests

Avant is a financial services provider that runs 2.5 million tests daily. As you can imagine, the sheer number of tests alone can drive infrastructure costs through the roof. Avant ran these tests somewhat in parallel through 30 containers. All this, coupled with a manual container build and tear process, resulted in a painful 33-minute wait for end-to-end builds. Then came CircleCI with its orbs and parallelization features. Orbs provide environment variables that enable engineers to build containers with persistent parameters automatically. The novel parallelization automatically spreads out tests across available compute resources. All in all, Avant saved up to 50% on infrastructure costs and cut the wait time for end-to-end builds from 33 to 15 minutes.

Release More Frequently

The weekly release policy that a fast-growing company like Branch, a service that uses deep links to unify the experience users get when viewing content regardless of the device in hand, requires a well-oiled CI/CD platform. Luckily, Branch has been successfully carrying out some of the fastest test-deploy iterations since Day 1 with CircleCI. This is because of how easy CircleCI makes it for developers to build out new environments using company-standard orbs. When new developers come on board, their learning curves are significantly shorter with easy-to-grasp CircleCI training. This keeps the growing company ahead of the competition and close to its proportionally expanding userbase.

Enhance Your Security

Coinbase, a Bitcoin company that manages sensitive transactions on the blockchain, previously was run on a SaaS platform. Coinbase migrated to CircleCI for its secure infrastructure and quick turnaround times from merging to deployment. With automated CI/CD thanks to CircleCI, the results were an astounding reduction in the amount of time developers spent waiting for feedback after each code commit to the main branch in GitHub. On the SaaS platform, developers spent half of their weekly hours actively building environments, testing, and maintaining merges. With CircleCI, they can now set aside a mere hour of their workweek for the same tasks. The results are apparent on the web and mobile systems that make Coinbase one of the biggest Bitcoin platforms worldwide.

Build for Scale

Dovetail is a technology product development and investment company that has built its clients up to billions of dollars. A company that grows other companies at the scale that Dovetail does needs the best CI/CD platform. This is precisely what it found in CircleCI. CircleCI provides both the speed and reliability Dovetail requires to build out pipelines for clients that handle millions of requests across widely spread geolocations. More importantly, it automates these processes through workflows that are easy to build and maintain. By eliminating the worry of inconsistent test results while bisecting the time it takes to deploy new releases, Dovetail’s customers can focus on their core business and scale into the stratosphere.

Unlock Automation Benefits

There are countless other case studies that we could pop open the hood of and expose the benefits they are enjoying as a result of their workflow automation with CircleCI. After seeing these case studies, perhaps this is the most pressing question: What do you want your business’s story to be? With CircleCI, you can start building applications that stand toe to toe with the best in the world.

Taurai Mutimutema