Tilting Point Migrates to Kubernetes With One Developer and Harness

About

Tilting Point is a leading, award-winning free-to-play games publisher that specializes in growing the games of independent developers. Their most successful games include Star Trek Timelines, Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest, and SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off. The last one achieved top 10 standing in 97 different countries when it launched and is still enjoyed by millions of players, along with their extended catalog of games. Tilting Point employs a data-driven approach to game development and user acquisition, powering up the existing live games of independent developers who may become closer partners on a new joint project as their relationship strengthens.

Growing Up…Beanstalk to Kubernetes

Tilting Point’s Lead Software Engineer, Evan Thomas, used Amazon Elastic Beanstalk and Jenkins to deploy the company’s flagship application. Evan built CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins that allowed Tilting Point to deploy twice a week. But as the company progressed, Elastic Beanstalk and Jenkins started to show their limitations.

The deployment pipelines were only capable of risky rolling deployments. If something went wrong in production, it wouldn’t be easy to roll-back. Monitoring alerts integrated into the pipelines returned 10% false positives, resulting in tedious troubleshooting. Evan was the only Tilting Point engineer capable of building new pipelines and maintaining existing ones, meaning Evan was spending 20% of his time babysitting Jenkins.

When deployments stopped working, I became the single point of failure. That was frustrating. - Evan Thomas | Lead Software Engineer | Tilting Point

Tilting Point decided it was time to move from Elastic Beanstalk to Kubernetes. They knew Kubernetes would help them scale their applications and eventually reduce the number of manual hours needed to maintain software delivery. But Tilting Point didn’t have a dedicated DevOps team or the bandwidth to hire resources to support the migration. They needed a solution to help kickstart the migration.

We were trying to figure out how to migrate to Kubernetes without a full DevOps team. - Evan Thomas | Lead Software Engineer | Tilting Point

Harness Gives One Developer the Power of a Full DevOps Team

Evan chose Harness to kickstart Tilting Point’s Kubernetes migration. Evan completed his first deployment on the first day. Harness has been empowering Tilting Point to modernize and mature their applications.

With Harness, I’m able to give engineers the same deployment experience as a huge tech company with a giant DevOps team. - Evan Thomas | Lead Software Engineer | Tilting Point

Harness provides out of the box canary deployments and reduces Evan’s time spent maintaining CI/CD. Because of Harness, Tilting Point was able to forgo hiring a DevOps engineer saving well over $100,000 in labor costs. The combination of Harness and Kubernetes allows Tilting Point to deploy every day, a 3x increase in deployment frequency.

Harness helped create Tilting Point’s new deployment process. The Harness support team continues to partner with Tilting Point to level up their software deployments.  

The Harness support team is second to none. - Evan Thomas | Lead Software Engineer | Tilting Point