"Full integration with Kubernetes clusters, and extremely fast builds."

"We’ve seen a 6-12x improvement in test run times after migration. Our normal integration/unit tests went from 20-30 minutes to 5 minutes on average."

The situation

Hover’s CI/CD solution was pieced together combining a number of SaaS applications with homemade deployment scripts and ECS. They deployed every other week.

The challenge

Hover adopted the goal of achieving Continuous Delivery within 6 months. Kubernetes was the obvious solution to the home-grown, heavy toil container orchestration solution. With no strong Kubernetes experience in-house, Hover needed to find a solution that could both accelerate their pace of delivery and their adoption of Kubernetes, with the ability to monitor the health and status of deployments, perform rollbacks, and more.

The solution

Codefresh stood out in Hover’s evaluation for a number of reasons:

• It is Kubernetes-first in a way other CI/CD vendors are not with its built-in dashboards and integrations
• It offers advanced Kubernetes deployment strategies such as blue/green deployments, canary releases, or using Helm, but does not require them.
• Built-in support for Docker Compose makes onboarding developers easier.
• The flexibility of pipeline composition ables CI/CD code reuse, common control points in the CI lifecycle, and the ability to match internal processes 1:1

Hover committed to a Codefresh migration in two parallel phases: existing tests were migrated to Codefresh, while new branches were being deployed in Kubernetes. The ability to “port” the bespoke existing setup allowed developers to get comfortable, and the seamless integration with Kubernetes clusters enabled rapidly iterating on their Kubernetes rollout strategy. When the time came to adopt another cloud, Codefresh made it trivial to add it as another deployment target.

There are other options out there that claim to be Kubernetes-friendly, but none of them give us the combination of extreme flexible pipeline management, full integration with Kubernetes clusters, and extremely fast builds.” – Sabice Arkenvirr, Hover

The result

“One surprising result for us was how much faster Codefresh has been. We’ve seen a 6-12x improvement in test run times after migration. Our normal integration/unit tests went from 20-30 minutes to 5 minutes on average. For our CPU and I/O-intensive computer vision regression tests, we went from over two hours to an average of 12 minutes.”

“Most critically, Codefresh has been extraordinarily helpful. From the beginning, they have focused more on helping us solve our problems than selling us a solution…”

I have worked with a lot of vendors in my 20+ year career, and this is the first time I can say that I would rather have a vendor like Codefresh than an entire team of my own solving the same problem.