Morningstar Accelerates Innovation and Reduces Developer Toil in a Compliant Way

Key Takeaway

Morningstar, a global provider of investment research and data, began its modernization journey over three years ago, with a recognition that traditional CI/CD tools and processes were no longer capable of supporting the company’s need for speed, reliability, and innovation. The fragmented toolchain was a bottleneck, preventing developers from delivering value quickly and reliably. 

Harness enabled Morningstar to accelerate delivery, reduce toil, and focus on business outcomes by accelerating builds by 5x and significantly reducing pipeline maintenance.

About Morningstar

Morningstar is a leading global provider of independent investment research and data. In a highly competitive financial services industry, the ability to deliver innovative features, data, and insights to customers with speed and reliability is critical to success.

The Challenge: A Fragmented Toolchain Was a Bottleneck to Innovation

Over three years ago, Morningstar embarked on a company-wide modernization journey to the cloud. While their applications were being refactored, it became clear that their legacy CI/CD tools could not support their goals.

Fragile Infrastructure

Platform teams spent excessive time maintaining aging, fragmented infrastructure and ~36,000 scripted pipelines across a dozen controllers with numerous build agents to maintain - including a collection of Mac minis running under a desk to support mobile builds. The system had become fragile and unreliable: DevOps engineers were frequently called in outside of business hours for unplanned maintenance (e.g., emergency patching of servers and CI/CD controllers).

"The legacy system needed a lot of maintenance. Even on the weekends, you would get a call about an incident that the disk is full or the CPU is high. So we had to make sure we resolved those incidents to unblock the developers or the deployments. That pulled us away from the precious time that we spent with our families". - Rohit Dalvi, Lead DevOps Engineer

Slow Delivery

The application teams also felt constrained. Feedback was delayed: developers often waited 45 minutes to an hour for builds to start due to queueing and infrastructure constraints, so they slowed down. Regulatory and internal compliance processes required developers to “swivel chair” between multiple tools and manual processes, increasing risk and delaying delivery.

The result was a slow release cadence. Most teams relied on three-to-five week release cycles, with many features and fixes bundled together in a “big bang” approach. Getting through the pipeline was painful, so teams just didn’t do it that often.

Software delivery bottlenecks hampered the team in innovation, but also when it came to responding to security matters. Like it did for many of us, the Log4Shell vulnerability of 2021 put the challenge into sharp perspective. The effort to patch hundreds of business units was severely hampered by build queues and infrastructure limitations. 

“People had to wait hours just to get something fixed, which should have been a simple change. Again, we were all working over the weekend and frustrated. As a result of that, Morningstar was exposed longer than we would have liked.” - Rohit Dalvi

Simplified and Secured CI/CD and Modernized Deployments

Morningstar chose Harness because of ease of integration and developer experience. The company implemented a suite of Harness modules (CI/CD and Security Test Orchestration) to create a unified, scalable, and secure delivery platform.

"One of the big selling points of Harness is the fact that we can implement templates that allow us to offer the developer a fully compliant, fully validated, robust set of processes that the teams can just use. They can focus on delivering software and features to our customers." - Kyle Binns, Senior Manager of SRE, Morningstar

Tackling pipeline sprawl was a key priority. Morningstar identified common patterns and established 50 centralized pipeline templates with built-in governance, security, and compliance controls, which replaced the 36,000 scripted pipelines in their legacy tooling. Developers now leverage these templates to spin up compliant pipelines in minutes, reducing custom scripting by thousands of lines and accelerating the onboarding process. Teams have instant access to advanced deployment strategies like blue-green and canary deployments, with no customer scripted required. Kyle Binns remarked, “Developers love that they were able to reduce thousands of lines of code in their CI/CD processes because they leverage these central templates that we built.”

The security and compliance controls were crucial in transitioning from a reactive compliance framework to a more proactive, seamless strategy. The team automated Sarbanes-Oxley and other governance approvals into the pipeline, turning days of manual work and waiting into a one-stop, self-service process for developers.

These pipelines were built on top of an improved infrastructure foundation as well. Morningstar was able to eliminate numerous legacy CI/CD controllers and the self-managed collection of Mac build machines. Harness has been able to scale to manage all builds and deployments from its central cloud, eliminating infrastructure toil. Meanwhile, the Mac build farm was eliminated as Morningstar adopted the Harness Build Cloud for Mac builds

Harness’s cloud-native, auto-scaling infrastructure eliminated build queues, leading to near-perfect build reliability, minimizing failed pipelines and rework. The use of Harness Test Intelligence and Harness Cache Intelligence reduced build times by up to 5X (from hours to minutes).

The Results: Faster Delivery, Happier Developers, and Stronger Governance

The move to Harness was a cultural and technological shift that produced significant, measurable results across the organization.

• 5x Faster Builds and Radically Increased Release Cadence: Build times were accelerated by 5x, and with wait queues eliminated, developers received feedback in minutes instead of hours. This enabled teams to move from a 3-5 week release cycle to weekly, daily, or even multiple deployments per day.
• Massive Reduction in Developer and SRE Toil: Consolidating 36,000 pipelines to 50 templates had a direct, positive impact on the developer experience. The platform team was also freed from the constant toil of infrastructure maintenance, allowing them to focus on innovation instead of "keeping the lights on."
• Near-Perfect Build Reliability: With scalable infrastructure and features like Test Intelligence, developers now experience a near 100% build success rate, minimizing rework and frustration.
• Proactive and Seamless Governance: By baking compliance into the automated pipeline, Morningstar reduced the risk and overhead associated with manual governance, proving that speed and compliance can coexist. If another critical vulnerability like Log4j were to occur, the team is now confident they can "address it very quickly," in minutes and hours instead of days and weeks.

The move to Harness was not just a technology shift; culture and process were equally important. Morningstar emphasized:

• Internal Stakeholder Alignment: Securing buy-in from product teams and executives was critical, especially as teams had autonomy to choose their own tools.
  
  
• Reduced Cognitive Load: Developers no longer need to be CI/CD or security experts; they can focus on delivering customer value.
  
  
• Operational Efficiency: By eliminating manual toil, platform teams shifted from maintenance to innovation, exploring Harness’s feature flags, STO, and future roadmap items.
  
  
• Partnership with Harness: The Harness team’s responsiveness to feedback and feature requests accelerated Morningstar’s ability to realize value and continuously improve.
  
  

Looking Ahead

Morningstar continues to unlock value from Harness, exploring features and products like AI Verification & Rollback and Database DevOps. The company is excited about Harness’s roadmap, particularly improvements to the developer portal and deeper integrations for database environments.

In summary:
Morningstar’s adoption of Harness transformed its ability to deliver software rapidly, reliably, and securely while significantly reducing operational overhead and cloud costs. The platform approach enabled both developer velocity and enterprise governance, proving that modernization and compliance can go hand in hand with the right technology and partnership.

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