How Trade Me uses Bitrise to connect Kiwis to goods faster
When the iPhone was launched back in 2007 we knew buying and selling should be available everywhere you go, not just on your personal computer. We’ve come a long way since then - now, every day more than 650,000 Kiwis visit Trade Me, and every month our mobile apps help over 1.3 million Kiwis find everything they need from used goods to new goods, motors, property, jobs, and insurance. However, to achieve this our engineers need high-performing processes and systems that enable us to deliver our ambitious goals.
For several years we relied on on-premise Mac Minis as build machines, as well as using self-hosted Jenkins, which made extensive use of integrations with GitLab, Jira, Firebase, Slack, and the app stores. While this worked for us early on, we knew we wanted something that would grow with us. We wanted to improve performance, and reduce the amount of time we spent maintaining the machines, systems, and integrations, all while ensuring PCI compliance.
Our extensive integrations and reliance on locally accessed services added some complexity, yet the migration to Bitrise was relatively straightforward. It took a couple of days to get the initial builds up and running, and a couple of weeks to have all our internal systems and processes recreated and working smoothly. We initially made extensive use of custom scripts, but over time have been migrating to use Bitrise’s Steps where it makes sense, to take advantage of the simplicity and improved functionality they provide.
Since the move, we’ve seen significant benefits. Our build and automation run times decreased by around 20% by running on newer hardware. And our workflow times significantly improved by not being constrained by the number of concurrent builds. Whereas previously we had queues to manage our limited resources, we can now scale up and scale down on demand.
We also significantly decreased the time spent maintaining our local machines and environments. Having all the repairs, patching, upgrades, and troubleshooting done for us has not just saved us time but also increased our reliability.
A final significant benefit we’ve seen is around ensuring our build systems are PCI compliant and secure. Because Bitrise is SOC2 compliant and uses environments that are spun up and destroyed (without concern for storing sensitive data), it ensures our user data is secure, saving us time in compliance, and reducing risk.
We’re continuously looking to improve our processes, experimenting with ideas, and evaluating the latest technologies and practices - and Bitrise has been a fantastic partner throughout! Their above-and-beyond customer service and availability have ensured a smooth transition, and their ongoing support and platform improvements have allowed us to use the latest hardware (Gen2), and improve our pipelines with features such as Build Insights and test automation sharding, which ultimately allows us to provide a top-notch developer experience, enabling us to build exceptional mobile apps.