devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Tony Bradley

  • DevOps will bring about the end of the human race

    DevOps will bring about the end of the human race

    DevOps will mean the end of mankind.

    Sure, it seems great now. Organizations can operate more efficiently. Routine tasks are automated. Development, deployment, integration, monitoring, and testing are all happening in continuously continuous harmony, freeing people up to focus on larger, more important things and continue to grow the business. What’s not to love about DevOps?

    Well, all of that seems fine at face value—but eventually it could be the catalyst that brings about SkyNet from the movie The Terminator and enslaves the human race to our Matrix overlords. DevOps is the missing piece that will enable technology to take over the world.

    Wikipedia defines the Technological Singularity as:

    The technological singularity is the hypothetical advent of artificial general intelligence (also known as “strong AI”). Such a computer, computer network, or robot would theoretically be capable of recursive self-improvement (redesigning itself), or of designing and building computers or robots better than itself. Repetitions of this cycle would likely result in a runaway effect — an intelligence explosion — where smart machines design successive generations of increasingly powerful machines, creating intelligence far exceeding human intellectual capacity and control. Because the capabilities of such a superintelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is an occurrence beyond which events may become unpredictable, unfavorable, or even unfathomable.

    We already have robots and drones capable of physical movement / action, and we have machine intelligence approaching full artificial intelligence. DevOps—with its continuous monitoring, continuous deployment, continuous integration, etc, all automated to essentially self-diagnose and self-heal—will be the glue that connects the artificial intelligence with the robot technologies. If the machines can plan and organize on their own, and have the connectivity to communicate with and control physical objects, and can automate most of the grunt-work through DevOps tools and practices the humans end up just being in the way.

    “Let’s face it. Humans are complicated. And human-driven release processes even more so. We find too many bugs in production code, performance is unacceptably sluggish, and breakages from manual handoffs are always holding us back. We need to let the machines handle these things so we can deploy production software that’s error-free and lightning-fast,” explained Alon Girmonsky, Founder & CEO, BlazeMeter. “With the full automation provided by Continuous Delivery and Deployment, we can finally achieve properly efficient operations.”

    Girmonsky added, “How can we expect the Singularity to come anytime soon with these clunky, error-prone, human-driven deployment processes?”

    Not everyone is so anxious for the advent of the Singularity, though. Jay Wampold, VP of Marketing at Chef, told me “We’ve never announced it, but we built a Singularity Kill Switch into our software for exactly this scenario. The truth is our work is more interesting when it involves humans. The cultural aspects of DevOps are more important than technology when it comes to achieving great business outcomes.”

    DevOps is awesome right now and everyone is happily jumping on the microservices bandwagon and embracing container technologies with both arms. As more things become continuously automated it is becoming painfully obvious that the one remaining bottleneck—the inefficient element of the whole process—is the biological human units that keep screwing things up.

    Coincidentally, I saw a quote recently that sums things up nicely: “From the machine’s point of view, The Matrix is just a cautionary tale on the importance of securing your wireless network.”

    DevOps may well be the catalyst that enables technology to rule the world. Whether it’s a benign evolution that eventually results in catastrophic consequences, or a well-orchestrated distraction by the technology we rely on—part of the early stages of the strategy to eliminate mankind—we might be on the path to the end of the human race.

  • Microservices define the next era of IT

    Microservices define the next era of IT

    There is a lot of focus on DevOps and container technologies these days. Both are very strong trends in IT on their own, but each is also proof of a larger shift in IT culture to a microservices architecture. A new report from IDC titled “The Emergence of Microservices as a New Architectural Approach to Building New Software Systems” takes a closer look at the evolution and impact of microservices.

    Let’s start with the obvious question: What exactly is microservices? “Microservices is an architectural approach that draws on long evolving experience in software engineering and system design, including the SOA efforts of the last two decades,” said Al Hilwa, research director, Application Development Software at IDC. “Microservices architecture is enabled by a spectrum of tools categories but is primarily an architectural approach to system design that also requires considerable organizational and cultural adjustment to execute successfully.”

    Put another way, microservices is an umbrella term that applies to breaking systems and applications down to a more granular, modular level. Containers are an example of taking an application and making it into a self-contained component, and DevOps provides the framework for developing, deploying, and managing the container ecosystem.

    By some interpretations microservices and containers are somewhat synonymous. In other words, microservices is just another way of saying that an organization is using container technologies for app development and deployment. IDC classifies microservices more broadly, saying it is based on an approach to organizing software development—more of a concept and less of an actual product or technology.

    The Wikipedia definition of microservices sums it up like this: “In computing, microservices is a software architecture style, in which complex applications are composed of small, independent processes communicating with each other using language-agnostic APIs. These services are small, highly decoupled and focus on doing a small task.”

    Although the concept of microservices is broader than the underlying platforms or tools it uses, IDC acknowledges that the advancements in software development and deployment methodologies—namely DevOps and container technologies—has played a pivotal role in elevating microservices to where it is today.

    The transition from a traditional hardware server infrastructure in an on-premise datacenter to a cloud-based, software-defined infrastructure that can be created, modified, or removed programmatically offers significant benefits for organizations. The microservices architecture enables companies to be much more agile and cut costs at the same time.

    There are some challenges and concerns as well, though. Hilwa notes, “Microservices architecture, by its very nature, is distributed and operates across networks and can thus exact significant performance penalties that must be accommodated with architectural solutions, like caching layers and API management and optimization techniques.”

    In the IDC report Hilwa talks about the need for strong organizational support and an overall shift in the IT culture in order to succeed with microservices. As Hilwa puts it, “Organizations have to increase their tolerance for risk and learn to fail gracefully, fast and often in order to achieve success.”

    Hilwa provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of microservices in the report along with some prescriptive guidance for organizations that are either just trying to understand what microservices is, or those that have already waded into microservices but want a better appreciation for the benefits and pitfalls.

  • AppFormix promises to help you manage your cloud infrastructure more efficiently

    AppFormix promises to help you manage your cloud infrastructure more efficiently

    Application Performance Management (APM) tools are great for…well, for managing application performance. AppFormix believes, however, that APM only takes you so far. You also need to manage infrastructure performance.

    The theory behind APM is simple enough: proactively monitor applications to detect and resolve issues in real-time without undue impact on application performance. What if the issues affecting application performance don’t have anything to do with the application itself, though? There are multiple components involved in developing, deploying, and running an application. One very important element of app performance is the infrastructure hosting and delivering that app. AppFormix wants to help organizations bring that same sort of APM visibility and efficiency to proactively addressing issues with the underlying infrastructure.

    In a press release announcing its exit from stealth mode and availability of AppFormix in beta, the company said, “Applications can only perform as well as the infrastructure they run on. Truly reliable performance can only occur when cloud infrastructure is more responsive to the needs of developers and their applications. AppFormix software automatically detects and eliminates resource contention among applications on shared infrastructure. Resource bottlenecks are always moving, and AppFormix is focusing on enabling developers, operations and DevOps teams to use the same toolset to pinpoint them in real-time and establish policies for preventing problems in the future.”

    In the world of DevOps and open source it’s crucial for tools and platforms to play nicely together. It seems that AppFormix delivers on that front. The company claims that AppFormix integrates with OpenStack, Kubernetes, Mesos and other platforms to enable organizations to effectively manage the physical infrastructure while also providing visibility and management for the virtual environment and container technologies.

    “For example, let’s say your application is a flashy, new (and expensive) sports car. Would you drive it on a dirt road? A rickety bridge? A street cratered with potholes? Of course not. But unfortunately cloud infrastructure today IS that dirt road, it IS that rickety bridge, and it IS that street cratered with potholes,” explains Sean Dunnigan in an AppFormix blog post. “If your enterprise does not invest in monitoring and controlling cloud infrastructure, your applications will be in for a bumpy ride. Enterprise cloud infrastructure needs monitoring and control to clearly eliminate bottlenecks and contention to ensure applications have the best infrastructure to “drive” on.”

    What’s interesting about DevOps and the various tools and platforms that have evolved to facilitate and support DevOps is how the line in the sand just keeps getting moved. First application development was the bottleneck so there was Agile. Then infrastructure was the bottleneck so we got DevOps. Then various integration, testing, deployment, and performance automation tools have sprung up to deal with new bottlenecks as they’re discovered. If AppFormix works as advertised, organizations can monitor and deal with infrastructure issues more proactively and move that line in the sand to the next bottleneck.

    AppFormix is available for both Linux and Windows operating systems and is currently available in beta. It is slated for general release in the third quarter of this year.

  • HashiCorp unites open source DevOps tools with Atlas

    HashiCorp unites open source DevOps tools with Atlas

    Open source and DevOps go together like chocolate and peanut butter, or like milk and cookies (these metaphors are making me hungry). Basically, they’re inseparable and—while each is good in and of itself—they’re better when united. HashiCorp announced today that Atlas, a platform for a variety of leading open source tools, is now available to the general public to help organizations make DevOps even better.

    HashiCorp has a number of popular, industry-leading open source tools at its disposal. Vagrant manages development environments. Packer automates building artifacts like Docker containers, OpenStack images, and VMware images. Consul is a tool for runtime orchestration. Serf is a protocol used by Consul for failure detection and message distribution in a server cluster. Terraform automates infrastructure provisioning on cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. They’re all great tools in and of themselves, but Atlas ties them all together into a powerful, cohesive whole.

    Atlas has been available in beta for a while with tremendous success. Nodes under management consistently doubled month-to-month during the beta, and heavy hitters like Mozilla and Cisco jumped on board to test it out.

    DevOps seeks to accelerate development and deployment. One of the primary attributes of DevOps is automation to facilitate automatic, error-free, auditable implementation of routine, repeatable functions. Many organizations strive to embrace DevOps tools and principles and leverage open source tools like Consul or Vagrant but use manual, time-consuming, error-prone processes that are difficult to scale and challenging to manage effectively.

    HashiCorp believes that Atlas is the solution—a platform that brings it all together and enables organizations to manage end-to-end from configuration management to container deployments across multiple cloud environments. Each of the open source tools is fine alone, but the ability to manage and orchestrate them as a whole is very powerful.

    “We initially rolled our own solution for infrastructure CI and deployment. As the team grew, our homebrew solution struggled to centrally manage configuration, Terraform state, and access control,” said Chris Lonnen, Internal Tools and Systems Architect at Mozilla. “Atlas remedies all of these challenges for us and provides a beautiful interface for audit logs, infrastructure history, system-wide monitoring, and more. We’ve never lost 9s betting on a HashiCorp product.”

    According to the HashiCorp press release, you can start using the hosted version of Atlas as of today, but on-premise deployments of Atlas won’t happen until late 2015. If you want more information about on-premise Atlas you can sign up at this link: https://atlas.hashicorp.com. The development features like Vagrant box builds and hosting and Packer builds and artifact storage are free, and the first 10 nodes are free as well. Pricing is $40 per node per month beyond the first 10 nodes.

  • Bonitasoft makes business process management more agile with open source

    Bonitasoft makes business process management more agile with open source

    Organizations embrace DevOps for a variety of reasons, but one of the core value propositions is speed. DevOps enables business to build, test, deploy and update applications more quickly than without DevOps. With so many quickly-moving parts, though, organizations also need tools to help keep track of it all like a business process management platform.

    Bonitasoft developed its business process management platform—Bonita BPM 7—to facilitate the creation of engaging, process-based applications. It was also important, however, that the applications be able to adapt in real-time to changing business requirements. The latest release is an open source version that represents a strategic shift for Bonitasoft—a somewhat inevitable evolution to leverage the same practices and principles in designing and maintaining the platform as the platform is intended to manage.

    “We’ve embarked on a new mission to create solutions that empower developers to build applications that support continuous change,” Bonitasoft CEO and co-founder Miguel Valdes Faura said in a press release statement. “To win in today’s competitive climate, you need to be able to adapt to change quickly and continually improve your business processes and the applications that support them. Bonita BPM 7 is the first solution leveraging the power of open source and BPM process-based applications that meets the demands of today’s business requirements.”

    Bonita BPM 7 is built on a popular and widely used open source BPM solution. Developers can create processes in Bonita BPM 7 using the BPMN 2.0 standard, and can seamlessly connect with existing third-party systems such as CRM and ERP systems. Bonita BPM 7 builds on the open source foundation, though, with more extensible frameworks, and a powerful connector builder tool to enable developers to freely code their own graphical components and REST APIs.

    The “secret sauce” of BPM 7 is the way Bonitasoft segregates business logic from the data and user interfaces. The separation makes it easier to introduce changes in real-time. Developers can perform maintenance or push updates to the user interface independently of the business workflow and without taking the application offline.

    According to Bonitasoft, the key benefits of Bonita BPM 7 include the following:

    • Speed – Developers can build applications faster, improving developer productivity
    • Freedom – Developers can easily build what business really wants, and companies can maintain their applications easier and more affordably with live updates
    • Adoption – Development teams can empower their users with more accessible, engaging and usable applications, boosting competitive advantage

    “Bonita BPM 7 represents a real convergence between the world of the ‘BPM app’ and traditional enterprise software,” Valdes Faura said. “It gives developers the freedom to easily code and extend the system whenever they hit the limit with its native features. Plus, the platform is built for change, so developers and business users can apply changes, updates and improvements over time – creating what we call ‘living applications’ that live and breathe and grow along with your business.”

    As developers develop faster and DevOps enables organizations to push and update applications more rapidly the need for tools and platforms to monitor and manage things grows. By leveraging open source software Bonita BPM 7 follows a successful strategy already employed by companies like Github and CloudBees. If you’re looking for a business process management platform you should check out Bonita BPM 7.

  • Apply DevOps automation to APIs with Akana

    Apply DevOps automation to APIs with Akana

    One of the core values of DevOps is automation. The ability to automate routine tasks and have triggers that automatically initiate other tasks takes care of all of the routine functions so developers and IT personnel can focus on bigger issues. One thing that has also emerged as driving force for DevOps—and IT in general—is APIs. Organizations have different platforms and tools from different vendors and they need everything to integrate smoothly together. The APIs enable that synchronicity but add another layer of complexity to develop and manage the APIs as well. That’s where Akana comes in.

    Akana enables organizatiions to quickly deliver scalable applications, connect and integrate applications, and share data as APIs. The Akana API Management Platform was created to give developers and IT personnel the tools necessary to effectively develop and manage APIs. Akana recently introduced new capabilities in its API Management Platform to streamline API management and reduce the time required to update APIs.

    One problem organizations face is that DevOps disrupts the traditional workflow and creates new bottlenecks. DevOps is sort of a natural evolution of Agile development—taking the principles of Agile beyond developers to the IT infrastructure and the company as a whole so that everyone can keep up with the faster pace of development. The rapid deployment of apps, however, can have a cascade effect that impacts the API lifecycle.

    As new apps are deployed the API definitions can change. Those changes have to be propagated to the API portal. The API owner has to update associated documentation. In most cases this process is a tedious manual exercise. The new Akana API Management Platform seeks to change that by bringing DevOps-style automation to the API lifecycle management process.

    The new API Management Platform integrates with continuous integration platforms like Jenkins and TeamCity. It has provisions for tracking necessary approvals to push updates to the API portal or API gateway. It also includes support for standard API descriptor document types like Swagger, RAML and WADL.

    “APIs have fast become the de-facto standard for digital enterprises to connect applications and services with digital end-points like mobile apps and internet-of-things,” said Brent Carlson, Senior Vice President, Technology, at Akana. “With this new capability, enterprises can deliver continuous innovation with speed and agility, ensuring that new updates and capabilities are automatically, efficiently and securely delivered to their developers and partners, in a timely fashion and without manual intervention.”

    No matter how streamlined you get you’ll eventually hit a bottleneck. As more of the development and deployment process gets automated that bottleneck gets moved farther down the chain, but then new platforms and tools emerge to address evolving issues and fix the new bottlenecks. For some organizations that have already embraced DevOps APIs may be the new bottleneck, but a tool like the Akana API Management Platform may alleviate that problem.

    It will be interesting to see where the next bottleneck strikes. At some point as DevOps evolves and every element is streamlined and automated the only bottlenecks will be organic—meaning the human beings involved in the process.

  • Open source and Samsung take center stage at Red Hat Summit

    Open source and Samsung take center stage at Red Hat Summit

    While much of the DevOps world was focused on DockerCon in San Francisco this week, there was also big news happening on the east coast. While DockerCon was shaking things up with the announcement of the Open Container Project the Red Hat Summit in Boston held its own share of big news and much of it spotlighted the important role of open source.

    “Red Hat is really the independent voice of Linux focused entirely on business,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group. “It is also a showcase of how to make money on the platform without taking advantage of anyone in the process and largely remaining true to the core tenets that created Linux in the first place.”

    Focus on Open Source

    One of the primary core tenets—if not the defining core tenet—of Linux is open source. The shared development and collaborative nature of the operating system as an open source project is its main strength. At the Red Hat Summit open source played an even larger role than normal.

    “The company continues to show strong momentum for OpenShift Commons as the re-write of the technology is moving forward showing that the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) battles are alive and well,” explained Al Hilwa, program director of software development research for IDC. “Red Hat also rebranded and updated its FeedHenry platform as it continues to turn it fully into open source and integrate it with OpenShift.”

    Samsung Partnership

    Aside from the focus on open source, the other big news out of the Red Hat Summit was a new strategic alliance with Samsung. Samsung will push Red Hat’s mobile platform and potentially other software into the enterprise in a more integrated fashion as a function of the new partnership.

    The relationship has potential, but according to Enderle there are both positive and negative outcomes possible. “Samsung needs Red Hat far more than Red Hat needs Samsung because Red Hat provided the enterprise brand that Samsung needs to penetrate the space. Samsung is a firm that has never found a platform they didn’t like and have historically been unable to focus on any one of them for extended periods of time,” cautions Enderle. “Red Hat alone won’t be able to fix that and Samsung’s behavior could actually tarnish Red Hat if they aren’t careful.”

    Strong Momentum

    Hilwa also made another observation about the strength of Red Hat’s business model. “That the company will cruise through the two billion dollar annual revenue barrier sometime this year is all but certain with its posted rates of growth. This is an enormous milestone for the open source world.”

    We’ll have to wait and see how the Red Hat / Samsung partnership pans out for either company, but the Red Hat Summit highlighted the strength of Red Hat’s momentum and the unstoppable juggernaut of open source development.

  • OCP is a victory for CoreOS and Containers in general

    OCP is a victory for CoreOS and Containers in general

    A broad coalition of major tech companies have joined forces to create the Open Container Project—or OCP. The move to develop and maintain common standards around software containers vindicates the CoreOS split from Docker and reunites the two in a common cause that will make all container platforms and technologies stronger.

    A press release announcing the Open Container Project explains the overall vision for OCP. “Housed under the Linux Foundation, the OCP’s mission is to enable users and companies to continue to innovate and develop container-based solutions, with confidence that their pre-existing development efforts will be protected and without industry fragmentation.”

    Docker and CoreOS are at the heart of OCP but they’re by no means alone. A veritable “Who’s Who” of DevOps and container technologies has enlisted to support OCP, including Amazon Web Services, Cisco, EMC, Google, HP, IBM, Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware.

    At one point Docker had a Standard Container Manifesto that spelled out some basic attributes it felt all containers should have. The Standard Container Manifesto called for containers to operate in a standard fashion, be content agnostic, infrastructure agnostic, and designed for automation among other things. When Docker removed the manifesto and seemed to shift to a more proprietary strategy CoreOS split off and launched its own container technology to continue the vision of a container standard.

    “An open, well-defined specification is required for the overall success and adoption of containers. At CoreOS, when we started the App Container spec (appc) our goal was to have a well-designed software container specification. With the OCP, we have now come together with Docker and many industry giants in an effort to unify this goal.”

    The launch of OCP and the laundry list of companies backing it show that CoreOS was not alone in its pursuit of the vision for a container standard. “We are excited to support this effort to bring the industry together to agree on a core standard for containers, which we feel will benefit all customers no matter what cloud provider they use,” said Jason Zander, CVP, Microsoft Azure. “Through our close work with Docker over the last year we have demonstrated our commitment to openness and welcome this opportunity to help create an open platform for customers.”

    “Customers need an open, interoperable future for software containers and we are happy to see the industry coming together to establish a common standard,” explained Kit Colbert, vice president and CTO, Cloud-Native Applications, VMware. “Our participation in the Open Container Project reinforces our goal to help customers innovate more rapidly and benefit from containers as they adopt the technology in their environments. We look forward to working with the community on container portability and security which are areas of focus for enterprise IT.”

    According to the OCP press release Docker will donate the code for its software container format and runtime—as well as the associated specifications—to the project. The leadership team from the Application Container spec (appc) will also contribute technical leadership and support for OCP.

    Ben Golub, CEO of Docker, summed up by acknowledging the effort and support for OCP. “We’d like to thank the many people in the industry who came together to support this important initiative. Our thanks to the Linux Foundation for the incredible work they have done in helping to pull this broad group together. Given the criticality of the intersection of containers and operating systems, we’d also like to thank Red Hat and Microsoft for their early leadership on this initiative. Our sincere appreciation to IBM and Intel for their ongoing encouragement of open governance. Finally, we’d like to recognize the members of the appc community, including Google and CoreOS, for their willingness to join all of us to constructively address these critical issues.”

    Now that all of the major players are united in a common cause to define and maintain an industry standard for containers it will be much easier for developers and organizations to embrace container technologies without reservation. The confidence that your investment of time, money, and effort won’t be wasted or paint you into a corner is very liberating.

  • ProfitBricks shakes things up with new Docker hosting platform

    ProfitBricks shakes things up with new Docker hosting platform

    Organizations and developers that want to leverage Docker containers have a variety of cloud platforms to choose from. Rackspace, Amazon, Azure and others all support Docker containers. There’s also a relative newcomer in the mix looking to shake things up.

    ProfitBricks is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company that believes it has a unique value proposition for companies that want to take advantage of cloud infrastructures and Docker container technology. ProfitBricks was co-founded by its CEO, Achim Weiss, and its CMO, Andreas Gauger. The two previously founded the Web hosting service 1&1 Internet.

    Weiss and Gauger launched ProfitBricks four years ago to solve a perceived problem. They saw the value of cloud infrastructure and cloud services, but felt that the existing platforms suffered in the areas of performance, flexibility, usability and cost. So ProfitBricks was born.

    ProfitBricks claims to have more speed and provide better value compared with rival cloud platforms. It calls its platform Cloud Computing 2.0.

    ProfitBricks Docker Hosting

    Docker has become a household name virtually overnight—quickly establishing itself as the de facto standard for container technology. David Bartletti, a principal analyst for Forrester, recently wrote in a research report, “Docker helps developers package code for quick assembly and hand-off to quality assurance, testing, and production release teams with greater confidence that their app will run consistently as it moves through the release process…The Docker open source community is growing quickly, with strong representation from nearly every major cloud vendor…As Docker containers proliferate, developers and operations teams alike will demand management tools that help organize and orchestrate hundreds or thousands of containers.”

    With so much momentum behind Docker and container technologies, it makes sense for a cloud infrastructure provider to integrate Docker into its ecosystem. Last week ProfitBricks announced its new Docker hosting platform. The platform features dedicated resources, redundant block storage, and 80 Gbps networking. It allows developers to choose images, link containers, and expose ports. The free tier offers customers 2,500 CPU Core hours as part of the Early Access Preview with up to 4 CPU cores, 8 GB of RAM, and 100 GB of storage.

    “When we first embarked on our Docker product architecture, we knew that it would not only need to meet the standards of existing Docker platforms, but also incorporate new, industry-leading features that addressed existing problems encountered with Docker,” said Achim Weiss, co-founder and CEO of ProfitBricks, in a press release. “Docker has been taking the DevOps world by storm since its widespread introduction to the community in 2014, and our platform will combine its impressive features with our flexible and painless cloud computing infrastructure.”

    ProfitBricks says that one thing that sets its Docker hosting apart from the competition is autoscaling. The ProfitBricks cloud infrastructure will ensure that resources are automatically managed to meet the demands of the Docker containers running on it. Developers don’t need to rely on standalone applications or custom scripts to scale resources because those capabilities are integrated seamlessly into ProfitBricks.

    ProfitBricks claims to be the best value in cloud computing. It offers a bold promise for the price / performance ratio on its site. “We guarantee that any workload deployed on ProfitBricks will cost less than the same workload running at the same performance level on the IaaS platforms of Amazon, Google or Microsoft.”

    You can check out the new ProfitBricks Docker Hosting for yourself. Visit this link for an Early Access Invite and find out if ProfitBricks can really deliver.

  • Jenkins User Conference is a win-win for CloudBees

    Jenkins User Conference is a win-win for CloudBees

    The Jenkins User Conference and CD Summit US East, will be held in Alexandria, Virginia in a couple weeks. Gene Kim is one of the keynote presenters and the event includes an impressive list of sponsors, presenters, and attendees highlighting the momentum of DevOps. I spoke with CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey—who will also be attending the event in Virginia—about the Jenkins User Conference, the growing Jenkins community, and CloudBees’ role in it all.

    Labourey expressed satisfaction with the growth and strength of the open source community involved in developing and maintaining Jenkins. It is the success of the community that both demands and allows for the Jenkins User Conference to be organized at locations around the world throughout the year.

    Continuous Delivery

    Jenkins is a platform for continuous delivery or continuous integration. The concept may initially have been targeted at developers but Labourey believes that the focus on continuous delivery is now higher up in the corporate food-chain. It’s now IT operations people and even the CIO and other executive leaders who are addressing the question, “How can we improve the delivery of software within the organization?”

    There is no single solution—no cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all way to do continuous delivery, though, according to Labourey. Every case is different.

    That’s why an event like the Jenkins User Conference is so valuable. Those considering Jenkins or exploring continuous delivery can learn more. Those already using it can share their own lessons learned and best practices. The community can collaborate and compare notes. By meeting and sharing companies and individuals can understand how other organizations are accomplishing things and take away the tips and advice that make sense and try it out for themselves. The cooperative nature of the Jenkins community is the fuel that drives it.

    Separation of church and state

    I asked Labourey to explain the relationship between Jenkins and CloudBees. CloudBees business focuses on delivering Jenkins continuous integration / continuous delivery for customers, so CloudBees obviously has strong incentive to ensure the success of Jenkins. He told me that CloudBees is a significant supporter of and contributor to the Jenkins open source project. CloudBees does not own or control Jenkins, though, and believes strongly in maintaining what Labourey called the “separation of church and state.”

    CloudBees has developers and engineers actively involved with Jenkins—contributing code and providing support. However, the Jenkins community organizes itself and manages the open source project without any involvement from CloudBees. The Jenkins community wants to remain independent and manage its own destiny according to Labourey.

    As noted above, though, CloudBees’ business relies on Jenkins. The stronger Jenkins is, and the better its features and capabilities, the better it is for CloudBees. That is why CloudBees has taken on the role of helping to organize and fund the Jenkins User Conferences. It’s a win-win because whatever helps the Jenkins community also helps CloudBees.

    Labourey promised that attendees of the Jenkins User Conference and CD Summit will not be disappointed. The sessions are filled with valuable content, and there will be discussion of recently added features and capabilities as well as the unveiling of some new ones. If you’re organization is using continuous delivery / continuous integration—or even considering it—you should check out the Jenkins User Conference.