Iterable Triples Deployment Speed & Reduces Downtime Risk by 85%

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Iterable is the growth marketing platform that enables brands to create, execute and optimize campaigns across email, push, SMS, in-app, and more with unparalleled data flexibility. An integrated, cross-channel solution—built for marketers, trusted by engineers, designed with intelligence.

From “Good Enough” to “Extremely Painful”

When Tenzin Wangdhen started as an SRE at Iterable, he inherited a software delivery process in disarray.

CD wasn’t really a thing when I started at Iterable and deployments were extremely painful. - Tenzin Wangdhen | Staff SRE | Iterable

Iterable had designed a delivery workflow for a simple application consisting of a few servers. But as the application’s complexity increased, so did deployment complexity. A few servers turned into over 1000 servers, and the once-simple delivery workflow required a dedicated developer to spend 8 hours a week maintaining CD scripts and tools. Delivery complexity also caused stability and quality issues.

The deployments occurred in weekly batches. Developers deployed from their laptops and declared changes in a Slack channel. This typically took a full day and unintentionally allowed developers to work over each other.

“We deployed weekly in batches, and when something failed it was extremely difficult to untangle where the issue originated.” - Tenzin Wanhdhen | Staff SRE | Iterable

40% of the deployments failed and it took roughly 4 hours to roll-back. Tenzin needed a deployment solution to help increase speed and stability.

Moving Faster Without Breaking Things

Tenzin was able to deploy 15 services in the first 15 days using Harness and gave developers the power to deploy by themselves without worrying about incongruencies.

I’d recommend Harness to anyone who need to deploy software securely. - Tenzin Wangdhen | Staff SRE |Iterable

Harness helped Iterable:

• Increase velocity 3x from 150 deployments per month to 537
• Decrease downtime risk by 85%
• Reduce change failure rate from 40% to 20%
• Reduce rollback time from 4 hours to 20 minute
• Decrease deployment effort by 89% from multiple day global deployments to 45 min

Harness helps Iterable manage reputational risk while increasing developer productivity.

Harness helps us manage the reputational impact risk associated with deployment failure and downtime. - Tenzin Wangdhen | Staff SRE | Iterable