About BambooHR
BambooHR is a leading provider of cloud-based Human Resources (HR) software designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Founded in 2008, the company offers intuitive tools to streamline core HR functions such as hiring, onboarding, payroll, performance management, and employee engagement. By automating time-consuming HR tasks, BambooHR enables businesses to focus on their people and strategic objectives rather than administrative processes.
With a focus on creating a positive employee experience, BambooHR has become a trusted partner to thousands of organizations globally. The company prioritizes simplicity and scalability, ensuring its platform can adapt to the evolving needs of its customers.
BambooHR's mission is to set people free to do great work. Led by its founders and an experienced executive team, BambooHR continues to help companies foster better workplaces where employees can thrive and contribute to organizational success.
The challenge
As an HR SAAS company, BambooHR faced key challenges related to its internal development and operations processes. These included:
- Developer experience: Ensuring a smooth and productive environment for software engineers.
- Operational overhead: Reducing the burden of maintaining infrastructure.
- Standardization: Establishing consistent approaches across teams.
- Onboarding velocity: Speeding up the process for new developers to become productive.
- Platform adoption: Encouraging internal usage and acceptance of new tools and processes.
These challenges highlighted a need to improve internal tooling and workflows to enhance efficiency and developer satisfaction.
The solution
Recognizing the need to address these challenges, BambooHR sought a solution to improve its platform capabilities. The decision was made to utilize Humanitec.
Why Humanitec: The primary reasons for choosing Humanitec included its ability to abstract Kubernetes complexity for developer experience, the level of support provided via the MVP program, and the fit with BambooHR's existing infrastructure.
Solution Design: The solution involved an MVP Program. The process focused on identifying touch points and integration points. Primarily, the design was to integrate with their existing tech stack, including Kubernetes, Backstage, Vault, Terraform, and Github. This approach aimed at replacing an in-house solution which was challenging to maintain and scale.
Humanitec's support was considered instrumental in BambooHR's decision to trust them with their Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Humanitec became the glue used to tie complex components together into a useful system. The abstraction that Score provides helps them scale the growing infrastructure while keeping software engineers focused on their strengths. The solution integrates with Github, Vault, Terraform, Score, and Backstage.
The results
With its new Humanitec-powered IDP, BambooHR has redefined how developers interact with infrastructure. The key results and metrics identified include developer satisfaction, onboarding time and effort, and resource standardization, leading to:
- Reduced operations overhead
- Standardization of resources
- Lower cognitive load for developers
- A modern, Cloud-first landing zone for monolith migration created.
Timeline and evaluation
Target architecture design: 1 week
Platform MVP delivered: 40 Days
Full integration:
Production readiness in progress
Major migration of monolith in progress
Onboarding a new developer: Designing target golden paths
"Humanitec's support was instrumental in our decision to trust them with our IDP. The abstraction that Score provides helps us scale our growing infrastructure, while keeping software engineers focused on their strengths."
- Kirk Hoganson, Cloud Architect, BambooHR.
Tools and Technology
- Platform Orchestrator: Humanitec
- Workload Configuration: Score
- Version Control and CI/CD: GitHub
- Infrastructure Management: Terraform
- Compute: Amazon EKS
- Databases: S3 MySQL
- Observability: Datadog, Cluster logging
