How Preply Accelerates Innovation with Jenkins: A CI/CD Success Story

In the fast-paced world of online education, Preply stands out as a platform that connects over 100,000 students with 25,000+ language tutors globally. But what powers their ability to innovate rapidly and scale their services? The answer lies in their robust CI/CD pipeline, with Jenkins at its core.

The Challenge: Scaling Innovation

Preply’s success is built on its ability to quickly adapt to market needs. From launching new language learning features to creating unique offerings like Pokemon Go tutors, Preply’s development team needs to move fast. This rapid pace of innovation requires a CI/CD platform that can keep up with their ambitions.

Enter Jenkins: The Backbone of Preply’s DevOps

Amet Umerov, a DevOps Engineer at Preply, explains their choice: “When we talk about DevOps tools, a CI/CD system is the first thing that comes to mind. We use Jenkins at Preply because we run hundreds of jobs every day, and we need to use many features that aren’t provided by other systems, or if provided, these features have stripped-down functionality.”

Key Benefits of Jenkins for Preply

1. Scalability: Jenkins handles hundreds of daily jobs, supporting Preply’s rapid growth and innovation.
2. Flexibility: The platform’s extensive feature set allows Preply to customize their CI/CD pipeline to their specific needs.
3. “Everything as Code” Paradigm: Jenkins enables Preply to have reproducible infrastructure, monitoring, jobs, and credentials in code, fueling a completely automated CI/CD process.
4. Customization: Preply’s team built a robust underlying infrastructure for Jenkins, integrating it deeply into their development workflow.

Preply’s Jenkins Architecture

Initially, Preply experimented with running Jenkins in Kubernetes but found it didn’t fully meet their requirements. They then pivoted to a more tailored approach:

1. Infrastructure: Leveraging AWS resources like EC2 instances, SSL certificates, and load balancers.
2. Integration: Connecting Jenkins with GitHub for seamless code management.
3. Automation: Extending Jenkins’ role beyond just builds to include configuration, jobs, and plugins.

The Results

By leveraging Jenkins, Preply has achieved:

1. Accelerated Innovation: Faster deployment of new features and services.
2. Improved Scalability: Ability to handle growing development needs as the company expands.
3. Enhanced Consistency: Standardized processes across their development pipeline.
4. Reduced Overhead: Automation of repetitive tasks, allowing developers to focus on innovation.

Conclusion

Preply’s success with Jenkins demonstrates how a well-implemented CI/CD pipeline can be a game-changer for fast-growing tech companies.
By embracing Jenkins’ flexibility and power, Preply has built a development infrastructure that not only keeps pace with their current needs but is also ready for future growth and innovation.As online education continues to evolve, Preply’s robust Jenkins-powered CI/CD pipeline ensures they’ll remain at the forefront, ready to seize new opportunities and deliver cutting-edge learning experiences to students worldwide.

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