CI/CD platform built for developer-first teams. From MVP to 10,000+ deployments per month — without burning the team out.
* Client name and identifying details changed to protect confidentiality.
Launchpad's founder had a clean thesis: the major CI/CD platforms had over-engineered themselves into enterprise tools that small engineering teams hated configuring. GitHub Actions was powerful but YAML hell. CircleCI was expensive for the volume they needed. Jenkins was a 2009-era nightmare nobody wanted to maintain.
The gap was a CI/CD tool that felt like it was built by developers for developers — opinionated, fast to set up, and transparent about what was happening at every step. They had a prototype and a waiting list of 400 teams. They didn't have production infrastructure.
"We had the idea right. We had the demand. We needed someone who could build the actual platform without us having to babysit the architecture."
— Founder, Launchpad CIWe built the pipeline runner on top of a containerized job queue using Bull and Redis, with Docker-in-Docker execution environments. Each build runs in an isolated container with configurable resource limits — no shared state, no build contamination. The configuration format was intentionally minimal: a single launchpad.yml in the repo root, with smart defaults that covered 90% of use cases without any configuration at all.
Logs stream to the browser in real time via Server-Sent Events — no polling, no refresh required. The build timeline shows each step with duration and exit code. Failed steps highlight in red with the last 50 lines of relevant output surfaced immediately, not buried in 10,000 lines of log. We ran usability tests until time-to-first-diagnosis averaged under 20 seconds.
OAuth app installation takes under 60 seconds. Webhook registration is fully automated. Pull request status checks, commit SHA tracking, and branch-level deployment policies were all built as first-class features — not afterthoughts bolted onto a core product designed for something else.
The platform needed to support hundreds of orgs with different usage profiles without noisy-neighbor problems. We built a per-org worker pool with burst capacity, tenant-isolated Redis namespaces, and a fair-scheduling layer that prevented a single org's 50-job queue from starving everyone else. The entire infrastructure runs on Kubernetes with Helm-managed rollouts.
Launchpad went from prototype to production in 9 months. By month 12 they were processing over 10,000 deployments per month across 340 organizations. The engineering team of 4 maintained an on-call rotation with a P99 incident resolution time under 14 minutes — something that wouldn't have been possible without a clean architecture from day one.
"The architecture they built is still running today, two years later, with minimal changes. That's the sign of a team that actually knows what they're doing."
— CTO, Launchpad CI