Finout Achieves up to 10 Deployments per Day with CircleCI and AWS

Finout is a FinOps solution that helps customers manage and optimize cloud spend across cloud providers and services. Finout's powerful cloud cost management tools require a flexible, agile environment where features are tested and deployed on a frequent basis. When Finout’s team was developing their product, they turned to AWS DevOps Competency Partner CircleCI for a solution that supported frequent deployments. CircleCI, a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, together with AWS, helped Finout deliver applications faster and expand the team’s testing and operational capabilities.

Finout’s goal is to provide a home for the FinOps, DevOps, and finance roles in an organization. The solution gives users a comprehensive view of cloud costs, without having to hunt for information across different systems. By centralizing cloud spend data and utilizing sophisticated analytics and optimization features, Finout helps customers boost cost efficiency and enhance the return on investment for their cloud initiatives.

Finout tools include financial reporting, anomaly detection, customizable dashboards, and real-time data tagging. To support the development and maintenance of these features, Finout constantly tests and deploys new code. Based on previous experiences with inadequate infrastructures at other organizations, Finout’s developers knew the importance of having a solid CI/CD solution in place. CI/CD was essential to making their development and release process smooth and efficient.

Finout turned to AWS Partner CircleCI for a comprehensive CI/CD platform that gave the team more control over their development lifecycle and helped manage the complexity of application development. CircleCI’s usability and competitive cost were key factors, as were its Orbs—shareable packages of configuration used to simplify builds. With just a few lines of code, Finout developers can use open source, community-driven Orbs to automate repeated processes, speed up project setup, and integrate with third-party tools and services.

Utilizing Orbs with predefined use cases, such as authentication with Amazon Web Services (AWS), helped Finout get started quickly. Orbs for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) helped the team integrate automation, scaling, and management for their containerized applications. This simplified deployments so they could happen faster and more frequently. “Without a CI/CD platform, typical deployments happen once a week or once every two weeks,” notes Yizhar Gilboa, co-founder and CTO of Finout. “It is cumbersome for teams, and frustrating for end users who have to wait for features and updates. Because of CircleCI, we’re making up to 10 deployments per day.”

After using CircleCI to facilitate continuous delivery, Finout realized the platform was also an ideal solution for scheduling and reporting to help automate DevOps. Scheduled workflows and testing allowed for more frequent tests and reduced manual work. In addition, scheduled, automated reporting provided ongoing insight into backend activities and status reports for who was on call. This helped the team identify processes that didn't finish on time, and to quickly locate resources to troubleshoot and solve issues. A report that measured build times helped identify when build times were occurring too slowly, and pinpoint where processes could be improved.

Finout also leveraged CircleCI’s built-in controls and guardrails to prevent security failures across its build, test, deploy, and release processes. An IP range feature helped the team administer access for specific IP addresses and IP ranges for machines allocated to the CircleCI workflow. This helped them identify and grant access for valid requests to their internal infrastructure. Plus, CircleCI Orb integrations with popular AppSec and DevSecOps tools enabled Finout to add authentication features and provide a secure environment for code deployment without requiring changes to their architecture.

Finout also found a major benefit in CircleCI’s support for creating and managing container images. Because Finout utilizes a microservices and containers-based architecture, the number of images the solution uses increases constantly. Building those images manually is time consuming and prone to errors. Finout dramatically reduced its manual work by using CircleCI's support for container images to push and pull images from Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR).

Finout configured CI pipelines to automatically build container images, run tests, and deploy applications in a controlled and automated manner. This ensured testing was executed consistently for each code change and streamlined the overall software development lifecycle. “Customers are getting higher quality features because testing is done in a very continuous way,” notes Gilboa. “CircleCI allows us to develop better software.”

Finout’s solution helps customers analyze costs, so a natural next step for the company is to analyze and optimize its own spend with CircleCI. This analysis will help the team optimize the best use of CircleCI both internally and as a service they provide to their customers. They’re currently considering a potential change to their deployment processes to make them even more robust. Perhaps an integration with other AWS services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store build data for future use and analysis. Or, leveraging Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to push builds and perform deployments to increase application reliability and scale. Whichever direction their journey takes them, the Finout team can rely on CircleCI’s indispensable CI/CD service and vast Orb library for an efficient, seamless path to success.