Goodbye Jenkins. Hello simple, scalable CI.
“CircleCI is a big part of our dev process and we wouldn’t deploy without it.”
Jason Garber
COO & Software Engineer at Promptworks
Why CircleCI?
We rely on CircleCI for continuous integration and continuous deployment on all our projects. Automated testing is very important to us, as is continuous delivery so that product owners (clients) can experience what we’re building hands-on as quickly as possible. Our workflow requires that we run tests on every branch and have a green build before merging to master, yet it’s surprising how many CI tools don’t treat feature branches as first-class citizens.
The Challenge Prior to CircleCI
Prior to using CircleCI, we had a complex Jenkins setup to create jobs for branches, run tests in parallel as matrix builds, and notify the team through email and Slack. This patchwork of plugins and scripts didn’t inspire confidence and required lots of setup and maintenance! When Jenkins was down, we’d be committing in the dark for awhile, which never turned out well.
“CircleCI got us a long way toward our ideal, and let us customize the rest of the way. We can run builds faster and tighten our cycle times to iterate with our clients faster.”
Jason Garber
COO & Software Engineer at Promptworks
The Solution
There’s not one script or thing we did that resulted in a big cost savings. It was more that CircleCI got us a long way toward our ideal and let us customize the rest of the way. We can run builds faster and tighten our cycle times to iterate with our clients faster. Compared to their old Jenkins setup, it saves one of our clients about $1500/month in maintenance time. For our other clients, they pay for less of our time to set up CI on another provider and at $200 an hour, it can add up very quickly. CircleCI is a big part of our dev process and we wouldn’t deploy without it.
About Promptworks
PromptWorks develops customized web and mobile applications for remarkable companies – ranging from startups to Fortune 50 – looking to improve the quality and polish of the software they use to interact with their customers. We help clients understand what’s possible, and our flexibility and insight saves them money. They come to us because, for a variety of reasons, they need to find a partner with the expertise and resources to get them through the product development process. The software we develop makes it possible for companies to do what they need to do.