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Redfin, a leading real estate brokerage in the US, is redefining real estate in the consumers' favor. It combines the best technology with the best agents to help customers win in today's market. Redfin partnered with Bitrise to build a more stable, scalable, and efficient mobile development foundation for Redfin’s iOS and Android apps. The result? Improved reliability, more stable build pipelines, faster release cycles, and greater peace of mind for Redfin's engineering team.
Before using Bitrise, Redfin’s mobile platform team relied on the open-source Jenkins project to run build pipelines and deliver apps to the stores. The challenge was that mobile engineers had to manually configure Jenkins and its runners, which was extremely time-consuming. They also relied on customized physical Mac machines to build the code, which required constant monitoring and maintenance. The result was a fragile and risky foundation to manage its mobile development.
In addition to physical infrastructure, the team had to maintain everything from the Java environment to scripts and more. Jenkins was prone to crashing unexpectedly, forcing the team to either reboot and hope for the best or spend time debugging to identify and fix problems like underallocation of memory. "We often felt like we needed a dedicated engineer just to run our Jenkins builds," explained Dennis Coldwell, Director of Engineering at Redfin.
Additionally, Jenkins required the team to patch quarterly and annually, upgrade its operating system, and ensure runners were up to date with the latest betas and Xcode versions. This left the team feeling like they were constantly in catch-up mode.
“Running our CI/CD builds on Jenkins made it painful to maintain our own environment. Having slightly different OS versions and software installed also caused sporadic build and test failures, which was a real concern.“
Chandu Surapaneni, Engineering Manager at Redfin
“Keeping our machines running with Jenkins became a major burden. There was also the constant threat of machines failing and taking days to fix, which could push back our releases by weeks. Our overriding goal was to move away from Jenkins and bring much-needed stability to our build pipelines.“
Dennis Coldwell, Director of Engineering at Redfin
Redfin needed a more stable, scalable, and efficient mobile development solution, leading them to migrate from Jenkins to Bitrise’s fully hosted mobile DevOps platform.
The overriding goal was to bring stability to its pipelines, and with Bitrise being fully hosted, they have been able to achieve that peace of mind, knowing that it is run on a fully managed environment with the highest-performing machines (M1 and M2 Pro).
“With Bitrise, stability is no longer a concern. The uptime has been fantastic, to the point where we don't even think about it any more. That’s a huge win for us and allows us to focus on innovation and improving other areas of our mobile development.“
Dennis Coldwell, Director of Engineering at Redfin
Before switching to Bitrise, Redfin had bespoke, custom-built processes in place for each build. Now, they can follow a consistent approach for builds and use standardized patterns to deploy code, which has been a huge step forward.
Redfin's key focus is reducing manual intervention and increasing automation, especially in testing. With Bitrise, they can now run parallel builds, allowing multiple tests to run simultaneously instead of sequentially, a limitation of their previous Jenkins setup. This has significantly accelerated their build and testing processes.
Word has spread across the company about the success they have seen with Bitrise on the consumer apps side of the business. As a result, other teams in the company have now moved to Bitrise, including the team building the internal app for the company's agents and the native apps for the rentals business. This is allowing them to drive consistency and share knowledge across the company to drive up development standards.
“It's a testament to Bitrise's success that we've expanded its use across multiple apps and teams like we now have. We would only do this if we had a positive experience and strong confidence in the platform. So it really has been a great success story for us at Redfin.“
Dennis Coldwell, Director of Engineering at Redfin
“Bitrise has given us peace of mind in day-to-day operations and maintenance. We no longer face frequent outages like we did with custom Mac Minis. All OS updates are handled by the Bitrise team including beta version installations—we don't need to do anything. It's significantly reduced our administrative overhead, allowing us to identify issues earlier and improve the reliability of our apps. We are able to stay one step ahead of everything, which is great.“
Chandu Surapaneni, Engineering Manager at Redfin
“Bitrise's exceptional support is what sets it apart. Whenever we've reached out to the team or raised a support ticket, the response has always been swift and helpful. It's also reassuring to know that Bitrise runs on the highest-performing machines and is mobile-centric, both of which are extremely important to us.“
Chandu Surapaneni, Engineering Manager at Redfin
“As we look to the future, we want to keep exploring ways to be faster and more efficient - we know this gives us competitive advantages. Also, we want to keep reducing our manual build and testing processes wherever possible. That's our top priority, and Bitrise can help us get there.“
Chandu Surapaneni, Engineering Manager at Redfin
“We see Bitrise as more than just a tool for mobile development; it's a partnership. We've built a great relationship so far and look forward to strengthening it going forward.“
Dennis Coldwell, Director of Engineering at Redfin
Are you experiencing the same challenges as Redfin? Ready to transform your mobile development to improve engineering efficiency? Contact our team today!
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