Bitrise Mobile DevOps platform increases the speed of a CI/CD process
Bitrise released its new Mobile DevOps platform. The company collaborated with 12 companies, including real estate market disruptor Compass, in private beta for six months to increase the speed of every continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process that runs on Bitrise.
The result is Bitrise’s second-generation platform, which is now available to the company’s more than 6,000 global customers and over 100,000 users.
Over the past year, the rate of mobile adoption has accelerated the equivalent of two to three years. Mobile technology requirements are also changing rapidly, increasing the need for speed and constant adaptation by mobile organizations.
The pressure on these companies is compounded by the fact that app store rankings and visibility are directly influenced by frequency of release cycles: the more frequent the releases, the better. All of this has cemented mobile as the platform where markets are won and lost.
To outpace this accelerated rate of progression, Bitrise set out to increase the speed of all of its automated processes–or builds–by up to 50%. These processes include everything from building an app and running regular tests to understanding how new pieces of code affect apps and testing new updates before shipping to the app store.
Considering that larger companies can run tens of thousands of builds per month, and that each build can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to two hours, increasing the speed of these processes can save thousands of hours of developers’ time.
Bitrise selected a dozen of the world’s most advanced mobile-first organizations to trial its second-generation platform before releasing it widely. Early trial users, including real estate platform Compass, reported speed improvements to their app development processes and release cycles, ranging from 30% – 50%. Bitrise has documented these improvements in its new Gen2 performance Benchmark Report.
For sophisticated mobile organizations, which release new updates, on average, once every two weeks, a botched update can cost millions of dollars. As a result, these companies don’t only rely on Bitrise for increased speed-to-market; they also use the platform to minimize potential negative end-user experiences by continuously merging and testing changes, and creating environments from which they can confidently submit updates to app stores.
“Mobile teams are increasingly responsible for driving business success. Our mission at Bitrise is to continuously make our infrastructure faster, more scalable, more secure and better equipped to support them,” said Arpad Kun, VP of Infrastructure at Bitrise. “The initial ideas for our second-generation infrastructure began taking shape over a year ago, then we challenged ourselves with a very ambitious goal: Make the platform 50% faster. This triggered our team’s competitive side and kicked everyone into high gear, making the new platform even better than we had originally anticipated.”
“Switching to Bitrise’s Gen-2 machines has increased the speed of our builds by 30%, by decreasing our average build times from 21.3 minutes to 14.8 minutes,” said Thomas Baji, the iOS engineer who led the migration at Compass. “Additionally, the improved machine performance decreased our yearly costs associated with CI/CD by 71%. This cost saving and improved performance has allowed us to move faster and deliver bold changes to our customers.”
The second generation infrastructure is part of Bitrise’s growing Mobile DevOps Ecosystem, which includes its CI/CD platform, partner network and user community. It’s available in Bitrise’s Enterprise Build Platform and its newly launched Velocity Plan.
In 2021, Bitrise will focus on customer co-creation and collaboration as one of the main methods of advancing its products.
Bitrise recently joined the newly formed Mobile Native Foundation, and has a number of upcoming launches slated for the rest of the year.