How Capillary Technologies uses GitHub

Capillary Technologies, headquartered in Singapore, develops AI-driven omnichannel customer engagement, commerce, analytics, and loyalty marketing solutions for retail. Founded in 2008, the company serves more than 400 customers globally—including Pizza Hut, Puma, Asics, Walmart, and Samsung—with platforms powering over 35,000 retail stores and supporting 300 million consumer interactions across 30 countries.

Company Overview

• Location: Singapore
• Industry: Customer Engagement and eCommerce
• Developer Team Size: 150+

From Subversion to GitHub

In 2013, Capillary's engineering team recognized that their reliance on Subversion was creating bottlenecks. "We were using Subversion for source control, wherein the code review, branching, and the release process was cumbersome," explains Piyush Goel, VP of Engineering. As microservices multiplied and the team grew, managing the complex codebase became increasingly difficult, and code review cycles slowed development significantly.

The company began migrating to Git and saw immediate improvements. In 2014, they adopted GitHub for new projects and eventually migrated their entire codebase. Today, GitHub is central to Capillary's end-to-end CI/CD architecture used by 150 developers and QA engineers.

Core Development Workflow

"GitHub comes into play during the entire software life cycle," Goel says. "It's the de facto tool for anything related to our code and software. It makes collaboration a lot easier."

GitHub serves as Capillary's primary platform for collaborating with vendors and third-party developers. "We rely on GitHub's organization permissions to make sure outside contributors can only see what is relevant to them," says Priyam Chokhani, Engineering Manager. "It's a great help in keeping our core platform and intellectual property secure."

Capillary uses GitHub's security scanning tools like Dependabot to ensure code security. "We like how GitHub doesn't just send an alert but makes specific recommendations on how to address an issue," Goel notes.

Integration and Automation

Rohit Raveendran, Principal Architect, describes GitHub as the "glue" connecting several services. GitHub's APIs enable tight integration with tools like Atlassian Jira for bug and issue tracking.

Capillary built their own GitOps tool called Deployer using GitHub's APIs. This tool automates the process of converting a repository into a Docker container, managing tokens and secrets, and pushing code through integration, testing, and pre-production environments to a production Kubernetes cluster. Developers can deploy software with a single click, and build feedback flows directly into GitHub, minimizing context switching.

Deployment Speed and Consistency

Capillary now performs 500 to 600 deployments per day across all microservices in various regions. "With GitHub, we deploy across five regions, and it takes less than an hour to finish the deployments, down from four to five hours previously," Goel says. This improvement enables Capillary to provide customers with more predictable timelines. "There are no bottlenecks in the process," Goel explains. "Release schedules are more consistent and predictable."

Onboarding and Open Source

Onboarding new developers is simpler because most are already familiar with GitHub. Many of Capillary's developers have experience with open-source software, and the company actively contributes back to the community by reporting bugs and patches to projects like Apache Livy, Apache Spark, Maxwell, and Azkaban.

Innersource Practices

GitHub enables Capillary to apply open-source collaboration principles internally through innersource best practices. Much of the company's code is available to all employees, and Capillary encourages cross-team collaboration. Developers can contribute bug fixes or features to other teams' code rather than waiting for those teams to make changes.

"Innersource has absolutely made our developers stronger," Goel says. "And GitHub is at the heart of that."