All case studies / Recruit Wizard
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Recruit Wizard scaled and moved to daily deployments with Octopus Cloud
About Recruit Wizard
Recruit Wizard specializes in software for recruitment agencies. Its solutions facilitate end-to-end talent sourcing management and several integrations, including payroll, timesheets, and job sites. Recruit Wizard operates in Australia and New Zealand and plans to expand internationally.
The team at Recruit Wizard is small and geographically dispersed, with people in Sydney, the Philippines, and Columbia. They use GitHub for source control and GitHub Actions as their build server. Octopus Deploy orchestrates all their deployments, primarily to Kubernetes clusters and some virtual machines.
Challenges
Weekend deployments and manual processes reduced team efficiency
Recruit Wizard was growing, and the team found themselves writing more code, but they couldn’t ship their software reliably. They started with manual deployments with step- by-step guides and then improved by automating processes with custom scripts. With frequent problems deploying to production, though, they resorted to deploying on Saturdays to reduce risk.
The team at Recruit Wizard started their automation journey by using Jenkins to execute automated deployment scripts. The aim was to reduce human error, but it wasn’t effective enough. In their view, “that’s not what Jenkins was designed for.” The team still performed processes manually, like editing config files, which introduced errors.
In 2017, Recruit Wizard began researching better solutions to automate its .NET deployments, including Azure DevOps and Octopus Deploy.
Solution
Confidence to ship small changes often
When the team at Recruit Wizard discovered Octopus, they found it easy to start a trial and complete their first deployment. They deployed an app in one day, making their decision to proceed straightforward.
With Octopus designed specifically to deploy software, Recruit Wizard had the confidence to ship small changes often. And the team didn’t have to worry about the deployment process breaking.
Recruit Wizard now uses Octopus to orchestrate all of its deployments. Its recruitment software integrates with many third-party services, and Octopus has supported the team as they scale their product.
Recruit Wizard also uses built-in steps, like the ‘Deploy to Kubernetes’ step, to reduce the need for custom scripts and to work seamlessly with containerized applications (built using Microsoft .NET 6 and React).
Since adopting Octopus, the feature Recruit Wizard uses the most is Runbooks. The team use runbook automation extensively for maintenance and emergency tasks.
They now have repeatability for every scheduled task, running scripts directly against infrastructure like SQL Server and other Azure resources.
I still code 90-95% of the day. When I tried Octopus for the first time, I realized it’s a tool built for the job: we were able to deploy an app within a day of signing up for a trial.
Configuration as Code
Recruit Wizard was an early adopter of Configuration as Code in Octopus. The team was eager to branch their deployment processes alongside their software changes.
Their development workflow benefits from branching their deployment process alongside their application code, and seeing changes side-by-side. It’s also improved the team’s code review process for deployment changes. Reviewing and approving GitHub pull requests allows them to find and fix typos or accidental changes that could affect customer data.
Config as Code is also helping Recruit Wizard to modernize and containerize older projects. Previously, the team cloned projects and made changes, but now they can branch a deployment process and use a template to bootstrap the process.
Ben from Recruit Wizard shared that he uses the Octopus user interface 99% of the time to make changes to his deployment process, but he finds it helpful to make small changes in Visual Studio Code or GitHub Codespaces.
Recruit Wizard's CI/CD pipeline
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Value
Modernization and growth with productive and empowered teams
Increased productivity
The team moved from deploying quarterly to multiple times per day.
Delivering more features to customers
Recruit Wizard ships code to production faster, without spending as much time in QA.
Less errors
The team saw a considerable reduction in errors when deploying to production.
Empowered teams
Recruit Wizard uses Octopus's Runbooks feature to automate all operations processes. This lets support staff self-service tasks without help from engineers, saving time and effort.
Flexibility while modernizing
With Config as Code, Recruit Wizard has multiple versions of its deployment process. The team keep their older process for hot fixing while building out new processes as they modernize and containerize projects.
Company growth through scalability
Recruit Wizard has scaled its deployments as the company grows and its recruitment software becomes more complex. Octopus has helped the team evolve their deployments to handle new integrations and services.
Security and peace of mind
Using Octopus Cloud, the Recruit Wizard team reported the satisfaction of not worrying about upgrading and maintaining Octopus. All updates are rolled out to their instance automatically, allowing them to focus on their expertise - recruitment software.
Looking to the future, Recruit Wizard plans to centralize templates for different project types to streamline its CI/CD pipelines further.