"Increased build speeds, a game-changing debugger, a UI that is easy to navigate - Codefresh has it all!"

Looking for greater scalability than its previous monolithic solution offered, Sama turned to Codefresh. The company was delighted by the range of additional benefits that came along with it.

The technological backdrop

Sama was using a legacy cloud platform, Heroku, and programming in Ruby with Angular for its front end. The company decided to move to microservices, migrating to Go and Python on Kubernetes. They were using CircleCI for their legacy tools and looking into Jenkins X for their microservices.

The challenge

“We had pretty much reached a breaking point with our previous tech stack,” says Mathieu Frenette, Senior Software Engineer at Sama.

As well as greater scalability, we were looking for better performance, a more practical development functionality, improved security, and greater control.

Jenkins X was our go-to for our microservices because I had previous experience with it, but it wasn’t ticking all our boxes, and ultimately its lack of flexibility made it very difficult to work with.”

The solution

Sama went back to the market and came across Codefresh. Within a week, the company’s engineers had learned the system well enough to create the first draft of a working workflow; within two weeks, they were using Codefresh for all new microservices. When the team occasionally hit a bump in the road, the Codefresh support team stepped in with a quick, on-point, detailed response.

“With Codefresh, everything is easily and readily available,” says Mathieu.

The UI is so easy to navigate that the learning curve was very fast. Once I on-board a colleague, they are empowered to go off and work in Codefresh on their own…

“Unlike the previous tool we were using, we were able to achieve our goals, without coming back with questions as often happened with the previous tool we were using. If an issue does arise, the Codefresh support team is extremely professional and responsive.”

Sama has also been also very pleased with Codefresh’s seamless integration with Helmfile, which they use to assist with deployments.

The result

Whereas the Sama engineers were used to working with only predefined workflows, they have quickly come to appreciate the freedom Codefresh gives them to get creative. Low-level building blocks are used for basic functionalities, and high-level tools and processes provide out-of-the-box logic and functionality, so they can always choose the right combination to create pipelines that cover any and all of the company’s needs.

The superior caching volume and ability to reuse it across builds has significantly sped up builds. The debugger has also proven to be a game-changer, enabling the engineers to place breakpoints in pipelines to inspect specific steps.

“There’s so much to love about Codefresh,” says Mathieu.

Thanks to the high-level building blocks, we can freestyle steps to achieve anything we need that is not inherently supported by the tool itself; the increase in our build speeds is like night and day, and the debugger changes everything.

“Our goal is to break down the wall between development and operations so that everyone can take ownership of the whole process – configuration, run, and troubleshooting. We are already seeing this happen with the three teams we have working with Codefresh so far.”