Traders Alloy - CI/CD pipeline for a Fintech startup

The situation

Releasing software and features can be time-consuming if you do it manually. And if you don’t get it right, you risk losing customers and being forced back to the drawing board. But there’s a way around all of those issues — continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Our client, the founder of Traders Alloy, a web-based financial decision support tool, was bogged down with a slow, manual deployment cycle and desperately needed to automate software releases to make the company more agile. Traders Alloy’s previous vendor was unable to get the CI/CD pipeline up and running, and our main task was to set it up and show the team how to use it to test and deliver software predictably.

Our Services

• DevOps

Technology

Team composition

After a tech and processes audit, we assigned a senior DevOps engineer to implement the CI/CD workflow.

Key challenges

In the hyper-competitive digital world, businesses that are slow to market risk failure. Traders Alloy needed to deliver features faster, make their development processes agile and automate testing in the cloud.

The Traders Allou website ran on a Digital Ocean cloud server, and they also had a physical server on-premises. So, one of the biggest challenges we had to tackle was to use the available resources to the fullest, without overloading any of the servers.

CI/CD workflow

Continuous integration and continuous deployment save companies precious time and money. Developers can make minor code changes, and errors can be found and solved faster. Plus, it’s all automated, reducing deployment time and the chance that someone could make a mistake, compared to doing it manually like Traders Alloy was doing.

Automated testing

Automated testing, and automation in general, frees up time that developers would otherwise spend running tests and making sure the features work before delivery. The Traders Alloy team wanted to run tests and show test results in the Jenkins UI.

Delivered solution

We looked at and proposed various tools but stopped at Jenkins because it’s open-source, reliable, and easy to configure and manage. We installed it on the client’s test server and used it to implement CI/CD for backend and frontend development, covering Traders Alloy's entire software development lifecycle.

After launching the CI/CD pipeline, our DevOps engineer showed the Traders Alloy team how to self-manage, test, and deploy. Once we gathered feedback from the team, we learned that Slack notifications for deployments and testing would greatly benefit and streamline their processes by adding transparency.

The results

With a CI/CD workflow and automated testing, the team can now:

• Run tests and display test results in Jenkins
• Deliver features to multiple environments
• Get notifications about deployments and tests in Slack
• Manage user roles: who can deploy, read test reports, etc.

Today, Traders Alloy is fully autonomous, with an occasional helping hand from our DevOps engineer. They deploy several times a day without skipping a beat and smash any bugs they encounter with autotests.