"I would describe Codefresh as the holy grail of CI/CD solutions."

"It just works! It's about stability. It's about reliability and having pipelines that work with a very high success rate."

Kandji provides a mobile device management solution for Apple devices in high growth businesses.

The company focuses on automation and fine-tunes its platform to save customers time and effort. Kandji takes the same approach in its engineering organization, where the IT team selected cloudnative architecture and relies on the time-saving power of automation. For Kandji, Codefresh was an easy choice.

The technological backdrop

Kandji built its product from the ground up and committed to cloud-native technologies and GitOps processes from the beginning. Bryan Lokey, Kandji’s Director of Engineering, says, “Using Kubernetes and GitOps is the modern way to deploy an application.” So the Kandji team looks for modern, cloud-native tools that support their way of working.

The challenge

Kandji’s goals include a rapid turnaround of new features and services, ready visibility into code deployments, and scalable operations. “We were looking to democratize deployment across engineering,” Bryan says.

Kandji wants every engineer to be able to push code into production and each to see all the code being submitted across engineering. Bryan had previous experience with Jenkins and CircleCI but found both lacked the hard focus on Kubernetes and GitOps he sees as central to Kandji’s success.

The pandemic and employees working from home drove rapid growth for Kandji (its revenue growth exceeded 700% in 2021). The ability to scale rapidly was and remains essential, but because key components of CircleCI are not Kubernetes based, Bryan believed they lacked the scalability Kandji would require.

I would describe Codefresh as the holy grail of CI/CD solutions.

The solution

Codefresh provides the scalable, cloud-native solution Kandji needs, and it enables the GitOps processes that allow for fast platform innovation. Chris Molle, Principal Cloud Architect at Kandji, says, “We primarily use Argo CD for managing our deployments, both from an infrastructure standpoint and for the visibility it gives to our developers. Codefresh really stands out in terms of the deep level of integration with cloud-native tooling.”

GitOps is a new deployment model for most organizations, so adopters must choose an implementation. Bryan Lokey says Codefresh makes that easy. “Codefresh has built Argo CD right into the platform, which makes it easier to roll out to developers and to use on a daily basis. It’s easier than trying to put together an internal solution.”

Kandji reports implementing Codefresh was easy, but when help was needed, Codefresh support was always available. According to Bryan, “The communication when working with Codefresh is amazing. Codefresh meets us where we want to communicate: directly in Slack.”

The result

For fast-moving Kandji, Codefresh accelerates development and deployment. “The results have been fantastic. Codefresh enabled us to adopt a GitOps-based deployment pipeline, which has significantly increased the throughput of pushing code out,” says Chris. “It gives us a much higher level of visibility in managing the deployment of services.”

By deploying Codefresh, on AWS, we are able to deploy multiple virtual node groups while still taking advantage of Codefresh’s scale-out protection – giving us a fully elastic CI and cost optimization all day.

For a rapidly growing company, however, just finding and adding talent is a challenge. Codefresh is making that easier as well. Bryan says, “We’re scaling fast. Codefresh makes it really easy to bring on new people and onboard them.”

Bryan’s advice for organizations looking for a GitOps solution, “Do a proof of concept, and see if you’re not immediately convinced Codefresh is the tool you should move to.”