A SaaS startup came to us with a problem: their engineering team was spending 15+ hours per week on deployments and server maintenance. That's nearly half an engineer's time.
The Situation
Their setup was all too common:
- Manual SSH deployments
- No staging environment
- Production bugs discovered by customers
- Developers afraid to deploy on Fridays (or any day, really)
The hidden cost wasn't just developer time. It was:
- Lost velocity: Features sitting in branches for days
- Downtime: Every deployment was a gamble
- Stress: On-call engineers dreading their phones
The Solution
We implemented a proper CI/CD pipeline in three phases:
Phase 1: Automated Testing (Week 1)
# GitHub Actions workflow
name: Test
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
test:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- uses: actions/setup-node@v4
- run: npm ci
- run: npm test
Every pull request now runs tests automatically. No more "works on my machine" issues.
Phase 2: Staging Environment (Week 2)
We set up an identical staging environment using Terraform:
- Same infrastructure as production
- Automatic deployments from
developbranch - Real data (anonymized) for testing
Phase 3: Zero-Downtime Deployments (Week 3)
Blue-green deployments mean:
- No maintenance windows
- Instant rollback capability
- Deploy whenever you want
The Results
After one month:
| Metric | Before | After | |--------|--------|-------| | Deployment time | 45 min | 3 min | | Weekly dev hours on ops | 15+ | 2 | | Production incidents | 4/month | 0 | | Deployment frequency | Weekly | Daily |
The $5,000/month savings came from:
- Reduced developer time on operations
- Eliminated downtime costs
- Faster feature delivery
The Takeaway
DevOps automation isn't just about fancy tools. It's about giving your team confidence to ship fast and sleep well at night.
Ready to automate your deployments? Let's talk about your current setup.