Find out how Sweetwater simplified pipeline administration with Harness.
Sweetwater gives music makers the ultimate shopping experience. Whether customers are buying their first guitar or building their dream studio, Sweetwater is committed to being a music gear retailer they can trust.
David Stahl was the first DevOps engineer at Sweetwater. As he began transitioning Sweetwater’s monolithic applications to Kubernetes and microservices, he uncovered a deployment mess.
Sweetwater built its legacy CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI and custom scripts. The pipelines required developers to create their own helm charts and took a full day to set up. However, many developers didn’t have enough experience with Kubernetes to set up their own pipelines. Instead, they turned to David who spent 30% of his time babysitting deployments and troubleshooting GitLab CI’s 20% deployment failure rate.
30% of my time was being spent babysitting deployments - David Stahl | Senior DevOps Engineer | Sweetwater
David needed to find a tool that would reduce Sweetwater’s deployment complexity and not require a masterclass in Kubernetes.
I was looking for a better way to on-board our services and deploy, without needing an intimate knowledge of Kubernetes. - David Stahl | Senior DevOps Engineer | Sweetwater
After evaluating Harness for a month and a half, David decided Harness would help simplify Sweetwater’s deployment complexity.
David has empowered developers to deploy on their own using templatized pipelines and a uniform deployment process across microservices. He decreased the amount of time to set up a new pipeline from 1 day to 1 hour and he reduced the deployment failure rate from 20% to 5%.
Harness gave David access to canary deployments and visibility into deployment logs. These features would have taken months to build internally but came with Harness out of the box.
Most importantly, David was given the space to work on more strategic projects.
Harness has allowed me to focus on strategic priorities instead of just firefighting deployments. - David Stahl | Senior DevOps Engineer | Sweetwater
Taking a look at where major DevOps trends are headed, a common theme across many tools and practices is improving the Developer Experience.
Need more info? Contact Sales