GoSpotCheck Masters Microservices CI/CD

About GoSpotCheck

GoSpotCheck’s real-time execution management platform empowers field teams to collect merchandising, sales, and compliance data — in addition to completing tasks in the field.

CI/CD Before Harness

Deployment pipelines in the past were scripted using CircleCI to support the many AWS ECS microservices at GoSpotCheck.

As a result, these pipelines were complex, limited, and time-consuming to manage, taking 1 engineer a few weeks to create with ongoing support. In addition, pipelines weren’t agnostic or portable across clouds, stacks, and platforms.

The overall deployment user experience was also painful, with limited insight into the status of pipelines, making it difficult to troubleshoot and debug. A history of YAML configuration also meant pipelines became brittle; a single typo could stop a pipeline from working!

Deployment verification and health checks were performed manually by the QA team using basic smoke tests in production. Rollbacks would take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes depending on the microservice team.

Our deployment pipelines were complex and not cloud agnostic. - Nick Wilson | DevOps Lead | GoSpotCheck

The Compelling Event

As GoSpotTeam became more cloud-native, leveraging microservices technologies like Go, containers, and Kubernetes the existing deployment process became too complex to manage. In addition, they lacked portability across different cloud providers. It was at this time the GoSpotTeam decided to evaluate Harness Continuous Delivery Platform.

Integrating Harness

Harness successfully integrated with GoSpotCheck’s technology and tools consisting of:

• Go, Docker, & Kubernetes
• Multi-Cloud of Heroku, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• CircleCI for CI
• HashiCorp Terraform for infrastructure provisioning
• New Relic, Sumo Logic, and Prometheus for monitoring and verification

CI/CD Today

Today, using Harness, GoSpotCheck is able to migrate several applications (and microservices) between cloud providers and regions in hours with zero downtime.

Pipelines are agnostic, portable, and dynamic that requires minimal maintenance by engineers or the DevOps team.

Deployment pipelines now take hours to create vs. days or weeks with the previous CircleCI workflows.

Continuous Verification and automatic rollback prevent engineers from having to understand service configuration and dependencies — they don’t need to worry about when or how to rollback. Deployment anomalies and regressions are automatically detected by Harness and its integrations with New Relic, Sumo Logic, and Prometheus.

Development teams can all watch, manage, and troubleshoot deployments together with ease, in real-time, with complete context of what’s going on. In short: Harness provides GoSpotCheck with a true Continuous Delivery as-a-Service platform for all developers.

Harness fulfills the promise of true Continuous Delivery - Nick Wilson | DevOps Lead | GoSpotCheck

The entire engineering organization has been exposed to Harness, with 3-4 agile teams actively using Harness on a day-to-day basis so they can continuously deliver.