How Kajabi Got to a 10-minute CI Build for 100k Lines of Rails Code

Brendon Murphy, CTO at Kajabi, explains how the company significantly reduced its continuous integration (CI) build time for its complex Rails application from 45 minutes to around 10 minutes by implementing Semaphore Boosters, an automated parallel testing tool. Kajabi, a SaaS platform for Knowledge Commerce, faced challenges with its slow test suite due to manual balancing of parallel runner configurations, which was tedious and inefficient. After researching potential solutions, the team adopted Semaphore Boosters, which offers automatic self-balancing and a user-friendly interface akin to Heroku's slider, allowing for more reliable and scalable test builds. The setup was straightforward, although it required addressing some intermittent failures in their suite. Ultimately, the integration of Boosters improved build reliability and allowed more frequent deployments, aligning with Kajabi's goal of reducing manual overhead and enhancing the development process.