New
EuroGPT Enterprise is open source, runs in Europe, and keeps your data private. Try it now
Felt transforms how teams visualize and annotate complex geospatial data. Felt’s mapping platform enables anyone with geospatial data to create and share dynamic, cloud-based maps.
To move quickly, Felt takes an unconventional approach to pre-production: every new pull request spawns its own dedicated environment. This helps Felt developers test new code and iterate quickly. But that same speed creates a heavy load on CI, especially when each preview environment triggers multiple test suites in GitHub Actions.
Over time, Felt’s reliance on default GitHub runners became costly. That’s when they discovered Ubicloud. With one simple tweak in their CI configuration, the team nearly halved their build times and significantly reduced their monthly bill.
Felt’s engineering workflow centers on ephemeral preview environments, eliminating the headaches of a single staging environment. Each environment runs thorough checks—from JavaScript and Elixir tests to end-to-end scenarios. While GitHub Actions reliably handled the tests, the frequency and volume caused costs to climb.
GitHub Actions did everything we needed, but as we grew, our usage (and costs) kept piling up. We rely heavily on these tests, so we needed something more efficient.”
A Felt team member stumbled on Ubicloud. It promised high-performance hardware for a fraction of the usual cost—and claimed a one-line integration in GitHub workflows.
“I honestly thought, it can’t be that easy,” recalls Can. “I was expecting a big infrastructure migration. But it was literally changing one line in our Actions config. We tried it with a subset of tests for a week to see if it’d hold up.”
The results exceeded expectations: not only did costs drop substantially, but build times fell by nearly 50% with bigger runners. Confident in that early success, Felt moved all test suites to Ubicloud soon after.
Felt’s 2x speed improvement came from newer CPUs and more parallelism with bigger runners on Ubicloud’s managed runners. Rather than being locked into a limited default runner, they could leverage powerful VMs sized for their workflows.
“Our biggest question was, ‘What’s the catch?’” Can says. “But there wasn’t one. Ubicloud gave us the same CI functionality, with newer CPUs, at a fraction of the cost. We kept waiting for a downside that never showed up.”
With CI cycles effectively halved, developers enjoy quicker feedback and can merge pull requests sooner. Even resource-intensive end-to-end tests using headless browsers run more efficiently now.
Performance wasn’t the only win: Felt also cut their CI bill by around 10x. Because Ubicloud harnesses cost-efficient bare-metal instances behind the scenes, pricing is far more economical than default GitHub runners.
And with a single-line migration, the risk stayed minimal. Reverting would be just as quick if something went awry—but nothing failed, so Felt committed fully to Ubicloud’s environment.
“We basically had zero downside,” Can explains. “We tested it, realized it was cheaper and faster, and switched over all our pipelines.”
Handing over a critical part of the CI pipeline to a new provider can feel risky. Felt eased these concerns after seeing that Ubicloud’s team had deep experience building large-scale systems.
“When you rely on a platform for all your tests, trust is everything,” Can notes. “They’d worked on similarly robust infrastructure before. That was key, because we needed to feel confident they’d handle our code securely and keep the runners stable.”
Ubicloud’s open source foundation also gave Felt peace of mind about transparency and portability.
Handing over a critical part of the CI pipeline to a new provider can feel risky. Felt eased these concerns after seeing that Ubicloud’s team had deep experience building large-scale systems.
“It really was the best of both worlds,” says Can. “Now, we can run all the tests we want without wrecking our budget. It’s a huge relief and lets us push even faster.”
Check out Ubicloud’s documentation to discover how you can reduce costs, speed up your builds, and keep full control of your infrastructure. Have questions? Reach out to us at support@ubicloud.com anytime!
