“We’re saving 24 hours a month in debugging using Codefresh.”
“Codefresh stands out because it's one system for CI/CD that uses ArgoCD, it has great onboarding, and a friendly team.”
Teachers Pay Teachers saves 24 hours a month in debugging compared to its previous solution
Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) provides the world’s largest marketplace of teacher resources. Its previous tools had maintenance issues, and its developers found them difficult to use. The developers also needed better visibility of their deployments and wanted everything in one place. They now use Codefresh to streamline their pipelines, and they save 24 hours a month on resolving and debugging issues.
The technological backdrop
Founded in 2006, Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) is the world’s largest marketplace of PreK–12 resources, powered by a global community of experienced educators. The platform helps educators find ideas for every learning moment. This lets them bring more creativity, better engage students, and level up their teaching skills. More than 7 million educators worldwide use TPT, with over 1 billion resources downloaded. TPT is part of the product suite of parent company IXL Learning.
TPT has 2 main products for teachers. The marketplace is where teachers can find resources from other teachers and buy and sell lesson plans and resources. Easel makes it simple and quick for educators to prepare and assign resources from TPT or create resources from scratch.
The platform is built on cloud-native technologies including Kubernetes and Helm, and runs mostly on EKS. TPT needed a tool to support its technologies. It also had to provide visibility and reduce challenges with setup and maintenance.
The challenge
TPT was using another vendor for its deployments, largely relying on open-source tools. One employee originally implemented the tool which became difficult to manage when they left the business. The team had to create custom solutions to make their Continuous Integration (CI) work.
As a result, the team faced issues with setup and maintenance. Developers needed a deep understanding of Helm to set up pipelines and a lot of support to use the tools. They struggled with pipeline visibility, and it was difficult to find the cause of issues and perform rollbacks.
TPT wanted a tool to provide visibility across their pipeline, and make it easier to identify problems. The team had to understand why something had gone wrong and in what order. They needed a tool to support their infrastructure, which is predominantly Kubernetes. It also had to address the challenges with setup and maintenance.
Raptor Dzuricsko, Senior Software Engineer at IXL, helped find another CI/CD tool. After looking at several solutions, the team chose Codefresh. They liked its GitOps-forward approach and that it’s powered by Argo CD, which the team were already experimenting with. Codefresh also stood out because of its helpful and supportive staff who made onboarding easy.
“It was important to us that we had a GitOps-forward tool. Codefresh really stood out to us, both from what it offered but also the support they had available.”
The solution
TPT uses Codefresh for its CI/CD pipelines. The team implemented deployments first and then expanded their use to manage their CI as well. They now have 2 pipelines, one for CI and one for deployments. They use Slack groups to notify developers and have a manual sync step to help with visibility. Their runners are on EKS clusters to meet their PCI compliance needs.
TPT uses a shared pipeline for multiple services in Codefresh. Each service has its own trigger and there’s a pipeline to add triggers to new services. This happens automatically, but the team can also trigger it manually.
Using Codefresh gives the team the visibility they need across their pipeline. They can see everything in one place, and can easily learn more information about deployments as they happen. The team now has around 100 applications and estimates a couple of thousand builds per month, which they manage in one place.
Codefresh has also helped the TPT team make setup and maintenance easier for developers. Integrations, like JIRA, have empowered developers to debug independently. With visibility of where errors occurred, the team can roll back to easily fix problems that arise.
“There are a lot of tools out there but Codefresh was the right call for us. We haven’t had any issues with deployments or rollbacks, and it’s saved us so much time on maintenance.”
The result
For TPT, Codefresh is a one-stop shop for CI/CD, and as a Kubernetes-first platform it suits the team’s needs. Using one system for their CI and CD has saved a lot of time.
Codefresh has helped the TPT team increase deployment frequency, and, importantly, saved them time on deployment and rollback issues. Since using Codefresh, they haven’t had any problems with their pipelines, saving hours on maintenance. They’ve saved 24 hours a month on debugging, letting developers focus on more important tasks. The support package Codefresh provides is also invaluable to the team, with someone always available to help.
As a GitOps-forward tool, the team also appreciates they can expand their capabilities as the business grows by using new features in Codefresh.