Glympse is making geo-location sharing easy

Watching food delivery or seeing when a repair person will arrive is powered by real-time location tracking. But once the food is delivered or the service is complete, you want your location forgotten. Glympse Inc. technology provides end-users with a temporary real-time location tracking platform to share their location. Glympse works with retailers and home service providers around the globe to provide real-time location sharing in their last-mile offerings.

At the end of 2017, Glympse was faced with the challenges associated with disparate processes. Code management and reviews were performed in different tools than pipelines were run in. At that time, pipelines consisted of disjointed Jenkins jobs. They tried Shippable, which improved the process a bit, but they still weren’t able to connect merge requests to production.

Glympse is in the process of earning a SOC 2 Type II audit and GitLab is vital to achieving the certification. Because Glympse is using Gold they can leverage built-in language agnostic CI pipelines. This allowed them to quickly respond to auditor’s feedback on the compliances of over 50 repositories and build a complete security package for integrating code changes into their environment.

One of the senior auditors commented in passing that having the code quality, SAST and container scanning, and pipelines all automated in GitLab is almost better than a manual review. “My response was, ‘Well, we're going to keep the manual review, that's part of our process’ but it's cool that he was almost okay with, not needing another developer for review. The security jobs in place are catching vulnerabilities from migrating to production through the product," explained Zaq Wiedmann, lead software engineer.

Wiedmann said the auditor also mentioned that Glympse had remediated security issues faster than any other company that he had worked with before in his 20-year career. Within one sprint, just 2 weeks, Glympse was able to implement security jobs across all of their repositories using GitLab's CI templates and their pre-existing Docker-based deployment scripts.

The team fully integrated GitLab into their environment in January 2019 over the course of a single month. GitLab allowed the teams to suggest a merge request, run unit tests on it, then automatically build a new Docker image which is deployed to the sandbox environment. GitLab triggers tests in the sandbox and production deploys which are all managed on auto-scaling GitLab runners.

“The managers are excited (about GitLab) because it helps reduce the amount of time we spend on things that we don't need to be spending time on. Focusing on the important stuff basically, get back to actually engineering and not focusing on building weird pipelines with Jenkins and Shippable and GitHub and trying to hook everything together in crazy scripts and stuff,” said Cillian Dwyer, site reliability engineer.

Glympse wired their GitLab pipelines to AWS and deploy directly into their VPCs across the world. Thanks to deploy environments Glympse is able to track and version across production and staging environments.

Glympse is also using all of the GitLab security jobs including SAST and DAST for static and dynamic applications security testing. Additionally, the company has container scanning, code quality, and license compliance jobs running. Jobs are managed within templates and imported by all production services.

“GitLab has had a positive effect on our culture. Everyone feels better about shipping code and deployments. There is more confidence in the org and deployment is a non-issue,” said Zaq Wiedmann, lead software engineer.