Building out the on-premises version of Travis CI has brought some interesting challenges for us. Beyond making changes to our codebase to talk to GitHub Enterprise and allows hosting Travis CI in a custom setup, a lot of work went into packaging and the installation process.

But these aren’t the only challenges of turning a SaaS product into something that’s easy to run on your own infrastructure. There’s updating, trouble-shooting when there’s an issue (especially hard when the infrastructure is unreachable to us), moving an installation, creating, checking, validating and keeping track of license keys, monitoring, logging, backup strategies, and so on. The list of things you need to keep in mind feels almost endless.

We’ve had experience with most of these things from running Travis CI in production for our hosted platforms, but we wanted to make the installation process as simple as possible. Our platform is a fairly complex set of components and apps, which aren’t easy to run on your own, but easy for us to operate and deploy.

We bundled up all of Travis CI into two Docker images, a challenge on its own, but we wanted to make it as easy as possible to download and install it.

Initially, we gave our customers a shell script to run on the machine that would host their Travis CI Enterprise instance. We’d provide them with a manually generated license key, and they’d be set up within a relatively short period of time.

But it still left us with the tasks of managing the license keys and finding a means to update running setups. The latter in particular is an interesting challenge when you create an on-premises version of a SaaS product.

The process above took us to get our first couple of customers set up with Travis CI Enterprise. But just from the first experiences, we’ve been collecting an ever-growing list of things we want to improve around making it easier to ship and maintain Travis CI Enterprise for our customers.

Just around the time we started planning and prioritizing some of the open issues, we were introduced to Replicated, a new product that gives SaaS products like ours a platform to easily build and deploy an on-premises version.

Their team has set out to tackle an interesting problem, and even their earliest releases promised to make our lives a lot easier to get our on-premises product into more customer hands much faster than we could before.

They’ve solved issues that we’ve had yet to solve at that point: backup management, audit logging, support bundles to make supporting our customers easier, updating existing installations and license management, to name a few.

After the installation, Replicated provides our customers with a management interface, giving them a quick overview of the system, including monitoring data, the currently running version, and notifications about new versions.

New releases of Travis CI Enterprise can now be shipped to customers as they need it, and usually requires them to follow the notification telling them about a new version and install it.

Replicated has allowed us to make our installation process a lot easier and, beyond that, have built tools that we ourselves would’ve had to build. Tools that a lot of startups need to make the jump from a SaaS offering into the very different world of Enterprise.

The video below shows the process from all the way to a running installation:

Want to try out the experience yourself and run Travis CI Enterprise on your own infrastructure? Shoot us an email and we’ll get you set up in no time, thanks to Replicated.