Lessonly by Seismic Says Goodbye to Jenkins and Toil With Harness CI Enterprise

About

Lessonly by Seismic (acquired in August 2021) is a powerfully simple training, coaching, and enablement solution that helps teams ramp faster, deliver effective feedback, and continuously improve. With Lessonly by Seismic, more than four million learners at 1,200+ leading companies—including Scholastic, Jostens, and U.S. Cellular—share knowledge, develop skills, and reinforce best practices. The results? Higher NPS scores, more deals closed, and a superior customer experience. To learn more, visit www.lessonly.com. 

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Lessonly by Seismic is not new to Harness. About a year ago, its product team migrated to Harness CD after having a sporadic CI/CD process using Jenkins and Spinnaker. Using Jenkins as their CI server, they felt the pain from managing it with all the server maintenance issues, downtime, and developer toil. Lessonly had two people managing the patched-together server. Rather than becoming pros at managing all of the infrastructure for the tool for the rest of their careers, they decided there had to be a better way.

With the successful migration to and investment in Harness CD, Lessonly looked at Harness CI Enterprise. The team saw the value of a single-pane-of-glass CI/CD solution where a developer could follow an artifact from creation all the way to deployment in multiple environments. 

A Tool Made for Developers

With Harness CI Enterprise, Lessonly is easing the burden of the development process from start to finish by providing better logging and exposability around building artifacts. With more developers involved and aware of the full process, managers and individual contributors alike are empowered to do their jobs more efficiently and provide a far better developer experience. Using Jenkins, Lessonly only allowed two admin users—but with Harness CI, the team granted access to over 30 developers. This gave developers ownership and the ability to track the progress of their application throughout the build, test, and deploy processes. Even the SRE team noticed that developers were able to handle build failures on their own!

“I’ve seen build failures be investigated and solved without any intervention from the SRE team. That was impossible when we were on Jenkins, because nobody had access to it. Now with Harness, I’ve seen failures get triaged and solved—like completely solved—without us ever being involved, which is super empowering.”

Tyler Henrichs | SRE | Lessonly by Seismic

The SRE team is able to easily and painlessly onboard developers to Harness CI. Whenever developers have questions, the SREs are able to quickly point them in the right direction and have them create the pipelines. They consistently praise Harness’ easy-to-use UI and validate that it’s a better developer experience for the entire team. Out-of-the-box Harness CI comes with a YAML editor and Visual Pipeline Builders so that developers, regardless of skill level, can create build pipelines. The SRE team at Lessonly loves this feature; it’s super helpful to see how to create pipelines in both views. This toggle feature, along with pre-built steps that are baked into the tool, allowed for easy initial setup.

Harness CI allowed Lessonly by Seismic to better empower their developers so that they could own the entire application delivery process—which we aim to do, one dev team at a time.