Why ArgoCD over Flux?

Both are solid. This team wanted UI-first visibility and RBAC granularity for auditors. Argo’s Application notion mapped cleanly to their domains, and their SREs already knew it.

Why not keep Jenkins and just fix it?

We tried. The pet server, plugins, and secrets model were the problem. Moving to GitHub Actions with OIDC removed whole classes of failure and simplified compliance.

How do preview environments avoid database collisions?

Two modes: for stateless services we use seeded ephemeral DBs (RDS snapshot clones) in a shared test account; for stateful constraints we swap live DB calls with contract-tested mocks in preview envs.

What did you measure to prove productivity gains?

DORA metrics (lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, MTTR), onboarding time-to-first-PR, PR cycle time, and incident counts. We also tracked SLO burn and change freeze violations.

Can we do this without Backstage?

Yes, but you’ll pay the tax in templates and documentation drift. Backstage made the paved road discoverable and consistent. Start small with one template and a catalog.

Case-studies · Nov 10, 2025 · 10 minute read

From Snowflake Jenkins to GitOps: The Platform Migration That Cut Lead Time by 71%

How a mid-market fintech ditched brittle pipelines, shipped 6x faster, and stopped paging platform engineers at 2am.

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From Snowflake Jenkins to GitOps: The Platform Migration That Cut Lead Time by 71%

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist