Adopting Neon branching in CI/CD pipelines: a practical story by Shepherd

Shepherd, an insurtech startup specializing in underwriting and pricing complex insurance risks, has adopted Neon branching in its CI/CD pipelines to enhance efficiency and reduce costs. By leveraging Neon's database branching, Shepherd can create ephemeral branches for testing purposes, which are integrated with GitHub Actions to automate creation and deletion processes. This approach eliminates the need for manually setting up testing databases, ensures resource optimization through auto-scaling, and provides safeguards against production data interference. Shepherd's backend journey involved migrating their Alchemist pricing engine from Excel and JSON to SQLite, and eventually to Postgres, motivated by the need for a more robust system following their Series A growth. The integration of Neon branching enables Shepherd to maintain seamless workflows, where temporary branches are utilized for testing pull requests, and Render is used to deploy changes to staging and production branches, ensuring zero downtime during deployments. This setup not only saves developer time but also minimizes costs associated with maintaining idle database instances.

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