Kajabi cut down 50% of their CI costs using Harness

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Introduction

Kajabi is the leading all-in-one platform for creator-led businesses. Kajabi helps people turn their knowledge into a sustainable online business by diversifying their revenue streams with digital products and services including (but not limited to) online courses, online communities, and coaching programs.

Kajabi's goal is to make it easy for content creators to monetize their ideas. Kajabi's engineering teams are responsible for the build, test, and deployment processes to support their rapid-release cadence and thus achieve the organization’s goal.

CI/CD Challenges with CircleCI and GitHub Actions

The build and test processes are crucial for Kajabi's continuous delivery, as they deploy their product multiple times daily. Previously, Kajabi used CircleCI and GitHub Actions for their Continuous Integration (CI) process because CircleCI did not support the type of Docker layer caching that they needed. The team had invested significant effort (3-6 months) in improving the speed and reliability of their CI/CD pipeline, which was previously slow and prone to failures.

While Kajabi eventually improved performance, the p90 build times remained around 45 minutes. Additionally, the pricing structure was opaque, and Kajabi could not accurately predict the CI costs associated with CircleCI and GitHub Actions and ended up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. All these factors contributed to Kajabi looking for a new CI solution to match their performance and cost requirements.

Kajabi and Harness CI

When Paul Simpson, Engineering Manager for the Platform and Automation team, first saw Harness CI, the pipeline studio and the ability to work with YAML caught his attention. This flexibility enabled him to create pipelines in YAML and visualize them in real-time.

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Harness’ Visual Pipeline Studio helps visualize pipelines

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Even though the migration from CircleCI and GitHub Actions to Harness CI took a couple of months, Kajabi was happy with the support of the implementation engineering team at Harness, which guided them through the entire migration process. To improve its CI performance, Kajabi used test parallelism, caching and restoring software dependencies (Cache Intelligence), Docker layer caching, and Harness’ bare metal infrastructure (Harness Cloud). The median build times were slightly reduced, but the more significant impact was seen on the p90 builds, which went from 45 minutes with CircleCI and GitHub Actions to less than 25 minutes with Harness CI. 

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"Our p90 builds went from 45 minutes on GitHub and CircleCI to 20 minutes with Harness CI,  which is a huge change!"
- Paul Simpson, Engineering Manager, Kajabi

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Kajabi spent almost 50% less on Harness CI than on the previous CI solutions because the build minutes per year got reduced by half. Kajabi also expanded their builds from Linux machines to Mac and Windows machines on Harness Cloud. Also, onboarding new teams on the Harness CI solution was easier than their previous CI solutions.

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“We saw 50% savings after moving from CircleCI and GitHub Actions to Harness CI”
- Jason Kehr, Director of Engineering, Kajabi

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With all builds within the acceptable range, Kajabi can meet their rapid release goals and thus help creators monetize their ideas faster. Kajabi is looking forward to using Test Intelligence - which selects unit tests based on code changes - and seeing more reduction in build and test times with Harness!