Argyle × Mergify

Argyle used Mergify to give autonomy to their dev teams while automating their infrastructure deployment.

Company

Argyle

Location

New York City, USA

Challenges

Increase the number of deployments done per week.

Reduce engineering time spent in deployments.

Manage the complexity and growth of supported systems.

Solutions
Organize their deployment framework around GitOps.
Leverage Mergify to automate pull request backport and merge.
Remove the deployment bottleneck by creating more automation.

Company's description

Argyle is the secure, compliant, user-consent based gateway for employment data, letting users connect their employment records to your application. With Argyle, businesses can process income & work verifications, gain real-time transparency into earnings and update worker profile details. Argyle was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in New York City.

Before Mergify

Each time the team implemented a change in their code and infrastructure, one person would be responsible for bringing the new code into production. Before Mergify, Argyle was doing two releases per week, and it would take half a day to prepare the release and push it into production. Having to rely on a single person was a bottleneck for Argyle.

Benefits from Mergify

Multiple deployments are implemented daily in a streamlined process.
Every team can work autonomously, from writing code, to deployment, to production.

Martynas Mickevicius - Software Engineer at Argyle

Argyle

There was nothing else that the release manager could do while ensuring everything was ready for production. We would burn one full day per week just to manage our releases.

Implementing a Workflow

As Argyle grew, the number of systems they needed to support increased. They decided to move to a GitOps approach by managing their infrastructure inside a Git repository.

Argyle chose to build their environment based on Git branches, one for production and one for staging. They could then leverage Mergify to backport pull requests from one branch to the other automatically.

When an engineer wants to release a change to production, they test it on the staging branch. Once it works, Mergify takes control: it automatically copies the pull request to the production branch, waits for the continuous integration testing to validate, and then merges the pull request.

Mergify Adoption

The adoption of Mergify by the Argyle team was straightforward. A few engineers wrote a Request for Comments document where they described their problem and what a solution would look like, giving their peers a few days to comment on the proposal. Once the team reached a consensus, they adopted this new release model based on Mergify. It was easy to convince people since automation's safety and time-savings was a real win for everyone. Using Mergify configuration editor, it took a few minutes for the team to deploy their first Mergify configuration and be all set.

Implementing Mergify also gave a greater sense of responsibility and ownership to teams as they were becoming fully autonomous from writing code to delivering the product.

Martynas Mickevicius - Software Engineer at Argyle

Argyle

Mergify is contagious. Once you've set up a workflow where there is no more stale pull requests for no good reasons, you want to deploy that everywhere.

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