Case Study Deskcasestudydesk.com
Business InsuranceSourced

Case Study: How Simply Business roughly halved CI build times on Semaphore

Simply Business Case StudySourced & dated by Case Study Desk
Key facts · TL;DR
Company
Simply Business
Industry
Business Insurance
Challenge
Slow CI builds and long queue waits
Headline result
Simply Business cut CI build times from about 30 minutes to roughly 12 and trimmed costs about 20% on Semaphore

Key results

~12 min
CI build time
down from ~30 min
-20%
CI costs
via configuration tuning
10-12 min
Queue wait
down from up to ~90 min

The challenge

Simply Business, a business insurance broker, faced CI build times of roughly 24 to 30 minutes and queue waits of up to an hour and a half, slowing developers' deploy cycles.

The solution

The engineering team moved CI to Semaphore, adopting faster F1 machines and customizing its configuration to reduce build and queue times.

“It was bonkers how quick those servers are and the effects that we were able to see right away.”

JB
Jenah Blitz
Full Stack Engineer, Simply Business

The results, in context

Simply Business reported CI build times dropping from around 30 minutes to roughly 12 minutes, queue waits falling from up to about 90 minutes to 10-12 minutes, and costs cut by about 20% through configuration tuning. Figures are quoted from Semaphore's published story and dated January 30, 2025.

Products used

Semaphore CI/CD pipelinesSemaphore F1 machines