Financial services provider, Procurify, brought DevOps culture to their engineering team, slashing deployment times
The challenge
Rapid growth is a good problem to have. At Procurify, the creator of business spending management solutions, teams across departments are adding staff, and sales are brisk. But with a good problem comes other headaches, such as maintaining quality, standardizing processes, and freeing up developers from admin so they can brainstorm new features to help Procurify customers.
“Growth is one of our biggest challenges right now,” says Fergus McDonald, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Procurify. “As we grow, we need to improve more processes. CI/CD was a big part of creating standardized processes for development. Our previous deployment process didn’t meet our business requirements. It was creating more problems than it was solving.” A key goal, says McDonald, was to increase deployments from one every two weeks.
The solution
Procurify switched from Travis CI to CircleCI in part to accelerate deployments – but also to automate workflows and save developer time that could be used for product enhancements.
“The biggest change for me was that a lot of things we used to have to do manually are now automated,” says Anastasiia Matviienko, Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET). “We can fix things faster, and investigate faster.”
CircleCI also integrates easily with GitHub, allowing developers to easily create CI/CD pipelines in just a few minutes. “Having flaky tests can be a major pain,” says Kervin Rosales, Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Procurify. “Now we have data that we can quickly drill into.”
After CircleCI was adopted, Rosales trained engineers on managing their own releases, essentially replacing himself by moving up from release manager and QA lead to Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, developing and maintaining CI/CD workflows.
“If you want release management to go away, DevOps has to be prioritized,” Rosales says. “And once we set up that culture, I was able to focus on feedback and continuous improvement.”
“Before CircleCI, it would take us an hour and 40 minutes to deploy — currently, it takes us 10 minutes.”
Fergus McDonald | Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Procurify
How CircleCI powers Procurify’s business
By automating development workflows and allowing engineers to take control of builds, Procurify has increased deployments from one every two weeks to eight deployments every working day – a 64X increase. In addition, the engineering team has significantly reduced the time needed for deployment steps.
“Before automating our deployment process in CircleCI, it would take us on average an hour and 40 minutes to deploy manually,” McDonald says. “Currently, it takes us 10 minutes to deploy. If we do 32 deployments in a week, that’s two days of development time saved.”
CircleCI also provides the engineering team with insights that drive decisions about improving the quality of the deployment pipeline. In one case, a parallel test runner failed repeatedly. Using the CircleCI Insights dashboard, engineers quickly realized that a test file was failing as well. Engineers were able to determine the priority of which tests within the test file should be optimized, eliminating the parallel test runner failures.
“Now we can spend more time on value-added tasks,” McDonald says. “We can ship more quickly and course-correct more quickly. That helps us focus on our customers even more, in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago.”
Benefits since using CircleCI
Saved 48 hours of development time weekly
Improved frequency of deployments by 64X
The ability to use dynamic configuration for a monorepo
About Procurify
Procurify is a leading all-in-one spend management solution that helps organizations deliver tracking, accountability, and end-to-end workflows for expenses and spending. Organizations can request, approve, and track spending through real-time data, streamlined workflows, and valuable insights while driving operational efficiencies and business growth.
