Earnin drives innovation and boosts deployment velocity by 3x with Armory
Through its app, Earnin empowers customers to control the money they earn by providing early access to wages outside the traditional payroll system. With a DevOps team of only four, Earnin needed to find a quick and cost-effective way to migrate its monolithic applications, microservices, and pipelines while at the same time improving and standardizing the deployment process to meet customer needs. By using Armory to deploy to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Earnin completed its migration in three months of effort and cut its deployment time by two-thirds.
Key Results
+100%
deployments in 4 months
-66%
mean lead time for changes
Moving from monolith to microservices
Earnin started out by solving one of the greatest—and least discussed—inequities in the American financial system: the practice of employers paying workers bi-weekly. Earnin’s core product, Cash Out, allows people to access the pay they’ve already earned. There are no loans or hidden costs; people pay what they choose. As the company grows, it is continually adding features to help customers manage their finances better.
While the Earnin app began as a monolithic application, it soon became clear that the complexities of scaling and maintaining the monolith would prevent the company from reaching its ambitious growth goals. At that point, the Earnin team decided to start the process of migrating to microservices using Amazon EKS and Amazon EC2. The flexibility of the Amazon solutions enabled Earnin to migrate over time with a goal of completing the process by the end of the year.
“We’ve significantly improved our infrastructure using Amazon EKS. We’ve cut overhead maintenance costs and accelerated our ability to automate and scale.“
“With Armory, our developers don’t have to worry about CI/CD anymore-they can focus on new coding and new features.”
Dien Mac, Engineering Manager at Earnin
Optimizing DevOps and deployment
Having migrated 45-plus microservices to AWS, Earnin turned its efforts toward improving its ad-hoc deployment process. With a DevOps team of four supporting over 100 engineers, Earnin needed a tool that would easily integrate with its existing stack and overhaul its complex, opaque, and manual deployment process. Because of its success working with AWS, Earnin chose Armory for its continuous deployment solution.
Armory creates a single path from code commit to production using a model that can be reused and iterated on as needs change. Armory’s GitOps functionality creates a repeatable, automated process, allowing Earnin’s small DevOps team to amplify their efforts, which reduces errors and speeds up productivity.
Using Armory, Earnin created GitOps workflows that allow its DevOps team to generate the CI part of the CI/CD process in one to two hours and the CD portion in 30 minutes.
Because Armory supports a number of different deployment strategies, including blue/green and canary with automated canary analysis, Earnin can be confident that the code it’s releasing is free of issues. “We have more visibility into the deployment process and more control of the target deployment,” said Mac.
“All people have to do is take the template and rename it. They just go in and run the script, put in the service name, and it regenerates everything for them and then the CI/CD is ready.“
Making an outsized impact
Going forward, Earnin is looking to grow, and part of that growth means making sure its platform is stable and available for expansion into new regions.
“This is the story of a small DevOps team making a very big impact,” concluded Adam Frank SVP, Product & Marketing at Armory. “By leveraging Armory, Earnin’s DevOps team has created a repeatable process that allows them to be as efficient and effective as
possible. Earnin has proven that scale isn’t necessarily dependent on the acquisition of people—with the proper solutions, you can focus less on the number of hands on the keyboard and more on innovation.”
“We’re going to grow with AWS for sure, and Armory allows us to manage the deployment part of our growth. We want to make our company bigger; we want to impact people everywhere. The solution we have right now is scalable, and it supports our vision and growth.“
Commit. Deploy. Repeat.
Focus on writing great code, not deploying it!