Qrvey reduced build times by 8x with Harness CI

Summary

• Qrvey was able to reduce build time from hours to 12 minutes on average
• The DevOps team spends less time on the security upkeep for the build infrastructure
• Migration from Jenkins to Harness was done within 3 months

About Qrvey

Qrvey’s embedded analytics software is specifically built for multi-tenant SaaS companies to help software product teams deliver better analytics in less time while saving more money than they could ever expect.
The DevOps team at Qrvey is responsible for ensuring fast and secure SDLC for over a hundred engineers. Keeping the speed of innovation up and delivering new features fast is important for all engineering teams at Qrvey.

Challenges

Before using Harness CI, Qrvey was using Jenkins for their CI needs. Even though Jenkins is a very popular open source solution for CI, the team at Qrvey faced many challenges with Jenkins.

• Build time: The builds took anywhere from 90 minutes to a few hours. Due to this, the quality assurance (QA) team spent a lot of time waiting for builds to complete. So, if there were an issue with the build, the QA team would have to go back to the developers after a couple of hours and ask them to fix it. This constant context switch caused a lot of frustration not only for the QA team but also for the development team. Additionally, this meant that new features were often delayed or did not meet the original timeline.
• Cost of infrastructure: One of the reasons for slow builds was that the Jenkins server had only 8 threads. Adding a more powerful server was always the option but that means the cost of infrastructure would go up exponentially. Also, maintaining their server meant that the DevOps time had to spend a lot of time on the upkeep.
• Security: With Jenkins, the team at Qrvey had to spend significant time making sure that the servers were secure. If the servers were to be compromised, then that would lead to exposing the code and other sensitive information to bad actors.
• Support: Even though Jenkins has strong community support which answers lots of questions, for more specific questions, the team at Qrvey spent hours finding the root cause.

"If you have 10 people waiting in the day, five hours to test it's, a lot of money (wasted)." - Luis Contreras, Lead DevOps Team, Qrvey

Solution: Harness CI with Harness Cloud builds

• Build time: Harness CI is known for extremely fast build times and that is true for Qrvey as well. With Harness CI, Qrvey reduced their build times from a few hours to 12 minutes on average. One of the reasons for the fast builds is Harness Cloud's build infrastructure. The Qrvey team was able to leverage 30+ threads with Harness Cloud in a cost-effective way, which would otherwise cost significantly more using self-hosted Jenkins servers.
• Migration: Since Jenkins pipelines can get complicated, one of the main concerns for users looking to phase out Jenkins is the time required to migrate their pipelines to a new solution. However, with Harness, the migration took only 3 months. The team at Qrvey can easily create pipelines that match their use case with Harness CI UI and YAML editor.‍
• Security and support: The Harness Platform provides many security and governance levers (such as fine-grained RBAC) so that users don’t have to worry about security. With security taken care of the team at Qrvey can focus more on innovation. Harness’ support team has been fast at responding to Qrvey’s questions which helps them unblock issues faster.

“Today, I am the hero for the engineering team at Qrvey” - Luis Contreras, Lead DevOps Team, Qrvey

Looking forward

The team at Qrvey is planning to use Harness CI with their Kubernetes solution. With the positive experience with Harness CI, Qrvey is also looking forward to integrating other Harness modules in their SDLC.