Case Study: Morningstar boosts delivery speed and reduces developer toil with Harness

Morningstar Accelerates Innovation and Reduces Developer Toil in a Compliant Way

Morningstar, a global provider of investment research and data, set out to modernize its cloud delivery process but was held back by a fragmented CI/CD toolchain. With roughly 36,000 scripted pipelines spread across a dozen controllers, slow build queues, and heavy manual compliance steps, developers often waited 45 minutes to an hour just for builds to start, while platform teams spent too much time on maintenance and emergency fixes. Harness’s Continuous Delivery, GitOps, Continuous Integration, and Security Test Orchestration products were used to address these bottlenecks.

Harness helped Morningstar consolidate pipelines into 50 standardized templates with built-in governance and compliance, eliminate legacy controllers and Mac build farms, and automate approvals into the delivery flow. The results were significant: build times improved by 5x, release cadence moved from 3–5 week cycles to weekly, daily, or even multiple deployments per day, and developer and SRE toil dropped sharply. Morningstar also achieved near-perfect build reliability and faster response times for security fixes, all while improving compliance.

Morningstar

Kyle Binns

Senior Manager of SRE