TeamCity Consulting

TeamCity is a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) server developed by JetBrains. It automates the process of building, testing, and deploying software, thereby enhancing the efficiency and quality of software development projects. TeamCity is known for its ease of setup, user-friendly interface, and robust configuration options. It supports a wide range of development languages and frameworks and integrates seamlessly with various version control systems and development tools.

The foundation of successful collaboration lies in the agreement on facts, while the key to achieving development velocity is through conducting experiments in the form of tests to validate the code's functionality.

Continuous Integration facilitates both of these processes by creating two distinct processes:

- The first process allows developers to agree on the "true" codebase, commonly called the master branch or trunk.
- The second process validates the codebase after changes are made using tests.

For startups, it is crucial to have processes in place that enable collaboration, and enhance the delivery of changes in a consistent, predictable, and safe manner. This is typically achieved by running automated tests after the introduction of a change into a Git branch or after creating a Pull-Request. If the tests fail or if the branch is not up-to-date with the latest changes from the main branch, the change to the code cannot be introduced to the main version of the code. Such measures ensure that non-working changes are not introduced into the main branch, instilling confidence in introducing changes to the system.

• Automates the CI/CD pipeline, improving the speed and reliability of software releases
• Provides a rich set of features out of the box, with no need for additional plugins
• Offers detailed build history and real-time reporting features for better insights into the development process
• Supports parallel builds and test distribution to minimize build times
• Facilitates easy integration with popular version control systems, issue trackers, and testing frameworks
• Enables customizable build configurations to meet specific project requirements
• Supports Docker for creating consistent and isolated build environments
• Allows for scalable infrastructure, with the ability to run builds on different agents and environments
• Ensures code quality with pre-tested commits and on-the-fly test analysis
• Provides a REST API for extending functionality and integrating with external tools
  

Our experience with TeamCity helped us build practical CI/CD patterns, reusable pipeline templates, and operating runbooks that we apply when helping clients stabilize and accelerate software delivery across different stacks and team sizes. We used TeamCity in real delivery environments where build speed, traceability, and secure automation mattered.

Some of the things we did include:

• Implemented TeamCity from scratch, including agent sizing, build configuration standards, and promotion workflows to reduce manual release steps.
• Migrated legacy CI jobs into TeamCity with consistent branching strategies, artifact versioning, and environment-specific deployment rules.
• Integrated TeamCity with Kubernetes to run containerized builds, isolate workloads, and scale agents based on queue pressure.
• Hardened CI security by tightening credential handling, setting up least-privilege service accounts, and implementing audit-friendly build approvals.
• Optimized build performance through dependency caching, parallelization, incremental builds, and agent pool tuning to cut cycle times and reduce cloud spend.
• Implemented build and deployment observability by exporting logs/metrics to Prometheus and aligning alerts with SLOs for pipelines.
• Standardized Docker-based build images and created repeatable pipelines for microservices to reduce “works on my machine” issues.
• Configured high-availability and disaster recovery practices, including backup/restore validation and upgrade plans to minimize downtime during maintenance.
• Integrated TeamCity with Git hosting and code review workflows, enforcing quality gates via automated test suites and static analysis checks.
• Delivered enablement for engineering teams through CI/CD playbooks, onboarding sessions, and support during the first releases to production.

This experience helped us accumulate significant knowledge across multiple TeamCity use-cases—from greenfield setups to migrations and performance tuning—and enables us to deliver high-quality TeamCity implementations that are secure, maintainable, and easy for teams to operate over time.

Some of the things we can help you do with TeamCity include:

• Assess your current TeamCity setup and deliver a CI/CD health report covering reliability, security, and maintainability gaps.
• Create an adoption roadmap that standardizes build conventions, branching strategies, and release workflows across teams.
• Implement and harden TeamCity servers and build agents (on-prem or cloud), including HA patterns, backups, and disaster recovery runbooks.
• Design reusable pipeline templates and build configurations to reduce duplication and speed up onboarding for new services.
• Integrate TeamCity pipelines with artifact repositories, test automation, and deployment targets to enable consistent build-test-release automation.
• Apply security guardrails such as least-privilege access, secret management, audited approvals, and compliance-friendly change controls.
• Optimize build performance and cost by tuning agent pools, caching, parallelism, and resource sizing to cut cycle time and infrastructure spend.
• Instrument CI/CD with logs, metrics, and alerting so teams can detect flaky tests, failing builds, and capacity issues quickly.
• Automate TeamCity configuration and environments using infrastructure-as-code practices to improve repeatability and reduce drift.
• Enable your teams with hands-on training, documentation, and troubleshooting support to keep pipelines stable as delivery scales.