ABC Fitness Eliminates Delivery Toil

About ABC Fitness

At ABC Fitness Solutions, they keep the fitness industry moving forward. Their innovative software solutions empower fitness leaders to focus on what matters the most: building relationships and improving the lives of their club members. With their industry-leading payment processing and billing solutions, streamlined membership portals, and partnership services, the work ABC Fitness does is shaping the future of fitness. Their journey to being the primary SaaS solution for fitness clubs is made possible by the extremely passionate and talented professionals who propel their company and software solutions forward.

Jenkins? More like“Jankins”

Developers want to build things that either improve customers’ lives or improve other developers’ lives. The DevOps team at ABC Fitness didn’t have time for either. Engineers Chris Jowett and David Leonard instead spent a significant amount of time maintaining and troubleshooting Jenkins.

ABC Fitness built its software deployment process using Jenkins and created a DevOps team to manage and administer the Jenkins pipelines. The DevOps team’s original goal was to increase deployment velocity and developer productivity, but that priority had to be shifted to keeping Jenkins from exploding. The DevOps team spent a month’s worth of work every quarter fixing broken pipelines and maintaining scripts. Jenkins pipeline failures began eroding developers’ deployment confidence.

Developers stopped trusting the CD process. Teams had a hard time differentiating between a pipeline failure and a code failure. - David Leonard | SRE DevOps Manager | ABC Fitness

David and Chris chased down defect after defect in Jenkins. At some point, Jenkins became the butt of a bad inside joke.

We referred to our Jenkins as “Jankins” because of its stability. - Chris Jowett | DevOps Architect | ABC Fitness

jan-ky | adjective |ˈjaNGkē | of extremely poor or unreliable quality. “the software is pretty janky”

ABC Fitness needed to find a better way to deliver code to customers.

Harness Relieves Deployment Burden

When ABC Fitness switched from Jenkins to Harness, they instantly reduced the troubleshooting and maintenance effort associated with software delivery. That effort has been refocused to improving the company’s platform.

We’ve been able to shift our focus to increasing velocity instead of maintaining antiquated procedures. - David Leonard |SRE DevOps Manager | ABC Fitness

Developers have regained confidence in the DevOps team by tracking deployment success with the metrics Harness provides. This confidence has led to a 20% increase in deployment velocity.

Most importantly, Harness has lifted a major burden from David and Chris’s shoulders.

Harness has paid for itself in time saved. - Chris Jowett | DevOps Architect | ABC Fitness