CI/CD Pipeline Modernisation | Global Self-Service Commerce Platform

The Client is a global self-service commerce platform powering unattended retail — from vending machines to micro-markets — across thousands of enterprise locations worldwide. As the platform grew its microservices footprint, its deployment infrastructure struggled to keep pace.

The existing CI/CD pipeline relied on Bitbucket as the delivery mechanism for Helm charts — a dependency that introduced frequent API rate-limit failures, inconsistent versioning, and unreliable deployments across microservices teams. As deployment complexity scaled, the fragility of the pipeline became a direct constraint on engineering velocity and platform stability.

Aziro partnered with The Client to re-engineer the CI/CD pipeline from the ground up — centralising Helm chart management in JFrog Artifactory, eliminating Bitbucket as a deployment dependency, and delivering a standardised, scalable pipeline capable of supporting the full microservices landscape reliably and at speed. 

As The Client's microservices landscape expanded, its dependency on Bitbucket for Helm chart delivery introduced compounding reliability, speed, and scalability risks across the entire deployment pipeline. Three interconnected challenges were constraining the engineering organisation.

• Frequent Bitbucket API Rate-Limit Failures: The CI pipeline was configured to pull Helm charts directly from Bitbucket repositories at build time. As deployment frequency increased across the growing microservices estate, these pulls consistently triggered Bitbucket API rate-limit thresholds, causing build failures and delivery delays across teams. Every rate-limit failure required manual intervention, slowing release cycles and eroding confidence in the pipeline as a reliable delivery mechanism.

• No Centralised Helm Chart Management: Without a dedicated, centralised Helm chart repository, versioning was fragmented across individual Bitbucket repositories. There was no single source of truth for chart versions across microservices, making governance, reuse, and rollback difficult to manage consistently. As the number of services grew, the absence of a structured chart management system became an increasingly significant operational liability.

• Inconsistent Deployment Standards: Because Helm chart consumption was tied to individual Bitbucket repositories rather than a standardised registry, deployment processes varied across microservices. Traceability was inconsistent, deployment stability differed between services, and operational risk increased as teams independently managed their own delivery patterns without a shared framework or auditability layer.

Aziro redesigned the CI/CD pipeline architecture to decouple Helm chart delivery from Bitbucket entirely, replacing it with a centralised, governed distribution model built on JFrog Artifactory. The solution standardised every stage of the pipeline — from build to delivery — ensuring consistency, reliability, and auditability across all microservices.

• CI Pipeline Helm Chart Packaging: The CI pipeline, rebuilt on Harness, now builds and packages Helm charts for each microservice during the build stage and pushes them directly to the Artifactory Helm repository. Bitbucket is no longer involved in the delivery path, eliminating the rate-limit failure vector entirely. Each chart is versioned and tagged at build time, creating an immutable, auditable artefact ready for deployment.

• CD Pipeline Pull from Artifactory: The CD pipeline was reconfigured to pull Helm charts directly from Artifactory and deploy microservices to Kubernetes. This replaced the previous Bitbucket pull approach with a faster, rate-limit-free delivery mechanism backed by Artifactory's enterprise-grade repository infrastructure. Deployments became deterministic, traceable, and significantly more reliable across all environments.

• Secure Authentication in Harness: Aziro implemented secure, governed authentication between Harness and Artifactory across all pipeline interactions. Every pull and push operation is authenticated, scoped, and logged — ensuring that access to the Helm chart repository is controlled, auditable, and aligned with enterprise security requirements. This eliminated the uncontrolled, unauthenticated access patterns that had existed when Bitbucket served as the delivery mechanism. 

CI/CD and Orchestration

• Harness CI/CD
• JFrog Artifactory
• Helm Charts 

Container and Infrastructure 

• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Microservices Architecture 

Source Control and Delivery 

• Bitbucket (legacy, removed)
• Artifactory Helm Repository
• Secure Token Authentication

Aziro eliminated Bitbucket API rate-limit failures, centralised Helm chart versioning in Artifactory, and delivered a standardised CI/CD pipeline that improved deployment reliability and engineering productivity across The Client's entire microservices estate.

The commercial outcomes delivered by the platform were significant across every dimension. The client's pipeline grew threefold post launch, driven by substantial enterprise customer interest in the multi-tenant capability. The product's expansion into B2C markets following acquisition opened two entirely new commercial channels that had not existed prior to the platform's delivery. Rewards redemption speed improved by 60% through the just-in-time transaction funding model that replaced the delayed, high-friction redemption flows the client had previously relied upon.

Perhaps most significantly, the Loyalty Pay product concept was awarded a patent following successful MVP delivery — a recognition of the genuine technical and commercial innovation that the platform represented. The multi-tenant architecture and mobile SDK framework meant that the product could be extended to new rewards programme partners rapidly, creating a scalable commercial model that continued to generate value well beyond the initial launch.

The PCI DSS compliance framework engineered into the platform from the ground up also gave the client a competitive advantage in enterprise sales conversations, providing the assurance that regulated industries and large financial institutions required before committing to a loyalty payments integration.

If your organisation operates microservices platforms with CI/CD pipeline reliability challenges, fragile external dependencies, or inconsistent deployment standards across services, Aziro brings deep expertise in pipeline modernisation, Helm chart governance, and DevOps infrastructure engineering.

We work with global SaaS platforms, commerce technology providers, and enterprise engineering organisations to design and deliver scalable, governed deployment pipelines that improve reliability, reduce operational overhead, and give engineering teams the confidence to ship at speed.