CircleCI’s scale and stability enables PayPay to continuously ship a quality product

PayPay, the smartphone payment service provider based in Japan, had 39 million users as of early 2021. With a user base this large, PayPay’s developer team needs to focus on features and updates, not on fixing broken CI/CD pipelines. In addition, since the PayPay app is managing personal finance data from users, developers are sensitive to any gaps in security.

“We have financial regulations that we have to adhere to, which means we’re continually testing our app to make sure it works well,” explains Shreyansh Pandey, Technical Lead for PayPay.

CI/CD without the extra overhead

PayPay’s development team initially used Jenkins for CI/CD for web and desktop, and Bitrise for Android and iOS versions of the app. But as PayPay grew, Jenkins and Bitrise couldn’t scale to meet the dev team’s needs. “We could see that we weren’t able to scale going forward, or grow with the tools we had,” Pandey says.

Part of the problem, Pandey adds, is that PayPay would have had to add more dev team members to simply manage the CI/CD solution. “That’s not what we wanted to focus on,” Pandey says. “We wanted a CI/CD that would scale without us managing it.”

Reliability and scalability: key reasons for choosing CircleCI

The PayPay development team decided to replace Jenkins and Bitrise with CircleCI, after running proof of concept tests on several solutions. “We made sure we knew how much time it took for each test to run on each solution,” Pandey says.

Reliability was also important. “Prior to going with CircleCI, we used to have breakdowns every week,” Pandey says. “With CircleCI, we haven’t had any significant downtime. And we don’t have to put up extra resources to manage CI.”

Developers have more freedom to create new features for PayPay, since they don’t need to tend to CI/CD downtime and maintenance. That freedom is key, Pandey says, at a time when PayPay releases updates for its app just about every week to meet demand from users and to keep pace with change in the competitive fintech market.

“Before using CircleCI, we could only do five or six pull requests a day,” Pandey says. “Now we’re up to 25 pull requests per day. That really helps us run as many tests as we want to, no matter how much the business grows. We can keep up our weekly pace of releases, benefit from CircleCI’s scale and stability, and still keep shipping out a quality product.”

“Before using CircleCI, we could only do five or six pull requests a day. Now we’re up to 25 pull requests per day. That really helps us run as many tests as we want to, no matter how much the business grows. We can keep up our weekly pace of releases, benefit from CircleCI’s scale and stability, and still keep shipping out a quality product.”

Shreyansh Pandey
Technical Lead at PayPay

Benefits since using CircleCI

• Pull requests increased from 5/week to 25/week
• No significant downtime, which helps the dev team focus on feature development

About PayPay

PayPay is a fintech company based in Tokyo consisting of diverse members from more than 35 different countries. PayPay has acquired more than 35M users in two years since its service launch in 2018.