Case Study: Superhuman reduces build time from 22 minutes to 8 minutes with Semaphore

Superhuman cuts backend deploy time from 22 minutes to 8 minutes with Semaphore

Superhuman, a company that prides itself on speed as the creator of a fast email client, faced a challenge with its slow and fragmented continuous integration (CI) process. Using multiple different tools for their backend, frontend, and desktop client resulted in a costly and inefficient feedback loop. They sought a new CI service from vendor Semaphore that was built for speed, supported macOS code-signing, and charged for actual usage rather than peak parallelism.

The solution implemented by Semaphore consolidated all CI processes into one platform. For Superhuman's Go backend, Semaphore runs tests and then builds and deploys Docker images. For their JavaScript frontend, Semaphore coordinates a parallel test run using 600 AWS Lambda instances. This integration resulted in a dramatic measurable impact: the backend deployment time was reduced from 22 minutes to just 8 minutes. Semaphore provided better performance, more parallelism, and a cheaper, usage-based cost model.

Superhuman