SaleCycle chooses CircleCI to ship features faster

The challenge

At a fast-growing business like SaleCycle, a UK-based behavioral marketing firm, legacy infrastructure slows down development and is a drain on time and resources. SaleCycle has been in the process of migrating away from its legacy systems, including Java and .Net, and toward microservices. It’s a complex process, explains Lukas Brusokas, Senior AWS Engineer for SaleCycle.

“We’re currently looking after and supporting two very different systems, which require time and resources to keep them up and running,” Lukas says. “The time spent on legacy systems is the time not spent on developing new features within the new system.”

The migration promises to reduce complexity for engineers, while helping to deliver more value to SaleCycle customers faster. In 2021, SaleCycle migrated its legacy systems from an on-premise data center to AWS, and now runs 100% of its infrastructure in the cloud.

The solution

SalesCycle engineers are adopting agile software development practices and working with multidisciplinary product delivery teams. Once the team transitioned to a microservice-based infrastructure, engineers wanted CI/CD tools with easily configurable pipelines to reduce complexity and maximize the number of deployments.

“We wanted something that is user-friendly, easy to configure, and simple to integrate between GitHub and AWS,” Lukas says.

CircleCI met these requirements and because several engineers were already familiar with CircleCI, engineers didn’t need tool-specific training. The team also considered AWS CodePipeline. “But the options to customize it were not as great as the ones offered by CircleCI,” Lukas says.

“CircleCI made it easier for us to streamline deployment processes and standardize the way we build, test, and release software.”

Lukas Brusokas
Senior AWS Engineer at SaleCycle

How CircleCI powers SaleCycle’s business

“CircleCI made it easier for us to streamline deployment processes and standardize the way we build, test, and release software,” Lukas says. “This means we can deploy changes of individual microservices to AWS fast, and quickly roll them back if needed.”

Lukas says the team’s average deployment time is around eight minutes. “The platform enables us to deploy changes as needed, which directly impacts how quickly we can deliver value to our customers,” he says. “We believe we can reduce this number further by making use of the insights dashboard, but even now, releasing bug fixes and new features and testing them in eight minutes is pretty good!”

Engineers are making frequent use of CircleCI workflows and orbs for code reusability, standardization, and readability. “Our ‘aha’ moment was when we started using orbs,” Lukas says. “We realized we should have used them sooner!”

Benefits since using CircleCI

• Delivering value to customers faster
• User-friendly and easy to configure
• Fast deployment and ability to roll back changes if needed
  
  

About SaleCycle

SaleCycle helps marketers reconnect with their customers online. SaleCycle’s solutions enable companies to improve their entire customer journey – from the moment someone lands on their website for the first time, all the way through to following-up purchases in style.