Open Energy Market (OEM) is dedicated to helping businesses reduce short-term costs and make confident long-term decisions through a tech-driven approach to energy and sustainability. Previously, we highlighted how OEM utilized Garden’s smart caching to achieve an impressive reduction in build times, cutting down from 30-40 minutes to just 10-15 minutes.
Dan Taylor, OEM's Director of Technology, emphasized the company's commitment to continuous delivery, operating on an "integrate little and often" philosophy. Despite these advancements, OEM encountered a new challenge as its development needs grew, and build times still posed a bottleneck. This case study explores how OEM tackled this challenge head-on by adopting Garden’s Cloud Builder, leading to greater efficiency and productivity gains.
Problem: The Build-Time Bottleneck
At Open Energy Market, the development team was experiencing significant delays due to slow build times. Each deployment took approximately 15 minutes, and with frequent updates occurring up to 12 times a day, the accumulated wait time severely impacted the team's productivity. This inefficiency led to developers' frustration and slowed the overall project progress.
Solution: Leveraging Garden's Cloud Builder
To address the issue of slow build times, Open Energy Market chose to leverage Garden’s Cloud Builder. The setup process was remarkably straightforward, involving just three lines in the configuration file. This simplicity allowed the team to quickly transition to Cloud Builder with minimal disruption, drastically reducing build times.
"Our mean time for deployments is about 15 minutes each. Now it's a solid four.”
Results: Dramatic Improvement in Build Times
Adopting Cloud Builder brought about significant improvements in build times. For front-end applications that previously took up to 15 minutes to build, the times were reduced to a consistent four minutes. For frequent deployers like Dan and his colleague Tom, deployment times for many services were reduced to just two minutes, drastically enhancing their workflow.
Dan did not enable Cloud Builder for his Windows users right away, so there was a direct comparison of error rates after adopting Cloud Builder. The error rate for Mac users using Cloud Builder was reduced to approximately 0.1%, compared to the Windows developers who experienced five to six failures daily. This reliability ensured the CI pipeline became more robust, with significantly fewer infrastructure-related failures.
Reflection: A Game-Changer for Development
The positive outcomes of adopting Cloud Builder at Open Energy Market were profound:
- Increased Productivity: Developers saved approximately a day per week that was previously spent troubleshooting build failures.
- Enhanced Reliability: The CI pipeline became more robust, with significantly fewer infrastructure-related failures.
- Cost Efficiency: By avoiding the need for expensive custom deployments, OEM managed to optimize their resources better.
- Developer Satisfaction: The feedback from developers using Cloud Builder was overwhelmingly positive.
Dan Taylor from Open Energy Market reflects on the value of Cloud Builder: "The transition to Cloud Builder was seamless, and the impact on our productivity has been remarkable. It has saved us time and allowed our developers to focus on what they do best – developing great software."
By adopting Cloud Builder, Open Energy Market has solved their immediate problem and laid a strong foundation for future growth and efficiency. Visit the Garden Cloud Builder documentation to learn more.
