Industry: Financial Services / Lease-to-Own Solutions
Key Technologies/Platforms: Jenkins, CircleCI, Octopus Deploy, GitHub Actions, Argo CD, AWS EKS, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS CloudWatch, Splunk, Grafana, Dynatrace
About the Client
The client offers lease-to-own purchase options online, through its app, and at retail locations. Consumers use its technology platform to receive an instant decision and choose flexible payment terms when buying furniture, appliances, electronics, and other products.
Business Requirements
The client needed a modern delivery environment that could improve release velocity while simplifying its existing CI/CD architecture. Key requirements included:
- Move away from legacy Jenkins pipelines and create a delivery setup that is easier to scale and automate.
- Bring CI/CD automation into builds, code validation, testing, and deployments.
- Shorten release cycles without risking application reliability or stability.
- Reduce platform dependencies, licensing costs, and the effort required to maintain the CI/CD environment.
- Use Git-based deployments and Kubernetes-native architecture as part of the development and release process.
- Build a scalable CI/CD architecture for financial services that can keep pace with changing application and release needs.
Business Challenges
The existing CI/CD environment had become increasingly complex to maintain as application and release requirements evolved.
- Multiple Platform Dependencies: Separate tools for continuous integration and deployment increased management effort and costs.
- Growing Release Demands: The client needed faster software releases without compromising reliability, security, or stability.
- Limited Deployment Traceability: Critical applications required more automated and traceable deployments with fewer manual touchpoints.
- Legacy Pipeline Limitations: Jenkins-based pipelines required continuous maintenance and operational support, adding overhead and limiting scalability.
- Complex Deployment Workflows: Build and deployment workflows involved several manual dependencies and integration points, adding time and effort to each release.
- Lack of Standardization: The existing setup did not provide the same level of automation and consistency across deployment environments, making releases harder to manage.
Impact and Business Benefits
- Faster Software Delivery: Build, validation, and release activities now run through automated workflows, cutting down the manual work involved in moving code through to deployment.
- Lower CI/CD Costs: With CircleCI and Octopus Deploy no longer in the setup, the client cut the licensing and infrastructure costs tied to these platforms.
- Simplified Pipeline Management: Consolidated workflows and standardized templates made the CI/CD environment easier to manage and maintain.
- Reliable, Repeatable Deployments: CI/CD automation and GitOps practices improved consistency and reduced errors from manual deployments.
- Greater Developer Productivity: Reusable workflows reduced pipeline management effort, allowing development teams to focus more on application delivery.
- Scalable, Cloud-Native Foundation: GitHub Actions, AWS EKS, Kubernetes, Docker, and Argo CD established a scalable delivery model, supported by AWS CloudWatch, Splunk, Grafana, and Dynatrace for operational visibility.
Our Approach and Solution
Jade Global applied its DevOps automation services expertise through a two-phase modernization approach, moving the client from legacy pipelines to a streamlined, cloud-native delivery framework.
FastPass 1.0: Building the Automation Foundation FastPass 1.0 focused on taking the existing Jenkins workflows and rebuilding them around a more automated CI/CD setup.
- CircleCI handled source code validation, build execution, and continuous integration workflows.
- Used Octopus Deploy to automate environment-specific release workflows.
- Introduced Argo CD for GitOps-based Kubernetes deployment automation on AWS EKS.
- Brought greater consistency and repeatability across application deployments. This gave the client a more practical starting point for cloud-native CI/CD modernization, with fewer manual steps involved in building and deploying applications. FastPass 2.0: Jenkins to GitHub Actions Migration The second phase simplified the architecture by consolidating CI and release automation onto GitHub Actions.
- Completed the Jenkins to GitHub Actions migration and moved build, validation, and release workflows to GitHub Actions.
- Decommissioned CircleCI and Octopus Deploy dependencies.
- Standardized workflows and reusable templates across applications.
- Retained Argo CD for GitOps-based Kubernetes deployments. The enterprise GitHub Actions migration reduced platform dependencies and created a more streamlined CI/CD environment.