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  • JFrog swampUP: DevOps Culture Is a Powerful Force

    JFrog swampUP: DevOps Culture Is a Powerful Force

    The notion that culture is such an important part of DevOps and high-performing IT teams gets plenty of lip service, but not every organization really buys into it. In my years covering the DevOps space, I can count only a handful of companies that truly represent the epitome of “DevOps culture.” One of these companies is JFrog.

    Every time I have the chance to interact with “the Frogs” and their community, I am reminded of what a powerful force culture can be in forging success. At the recent swampUP user conference in San Francisco, the JFrog secret sauce was again on display. From the little things, such as designing and decorating the conference themselves, to the bigger things in terms of the theme of the sessions and activities, swampUP was a great and learning time for all. Our Digital Anarchist team was on hand and we did a bunch of videos that you can watch up on DigitalAnarchist.io. The videos are with speakers at the conference, attendees, JFrog employees and partners.

    One of my favorite videos from swampUP was the one I have embedded here. It is the three co-founders of JFrog—Yoav Landman, Fred Simon and Shlomi Ben Haim and I discussing business and what makes JFrog’s culture so special. Have a listen and maybe get some insight into making the culture of your own organization better.

    Also, if you are in Israel Sept. 24, check out Yalla DevOps, a first-time conference JFrog and others are producing that looks like it will be a great event. The Digital Anarchist team will be there covering with video (even broadcasting live), along with John Willis as a keynote speaker; Jayne Groll, my co-founder at DevOps Institute; and others.

    In the meantime, enjoy the video:

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud on Digital Anarchist, and we’re here in San Francisco at JFrog swampUP 2019. It’s been a great conference, and I’m really, really lucky and happy to be joined—I feel like I’m at a Beatles reunion, for some reason. I’ve got Ringo, Paul, John—

    Shlomi Ben Haim: Who’s John Lennon? I’m afraid. [Laughter]

    Shimel: – done. Anyway, but no, we’re not at a Beatles reunion, but we do have the three JFrog co-founders here with me. I’m gonna let them introduce themselves. We’re gonna go to the far right to Fred. Fred, go ahead.

    Fred Simon: Hi, I’m Fred Simon, co-founder and Chief Data Scientist today at JFrog and I’m really happy to be here. Thank you.

    Shimel: Thanks, Fred.

    Yoav Landman: Yoav Landman, CTO and co-founder of JFrog.

    Ben Haim: I’m Shlomi Ben Haim, CEO and co-founder of JFrog.

    Shimel: Three co-founders on one panel—there you go. So, guys, first of all, congratulations on another great event.

    Simon: Thank you.

    Shimel: You know, you know this, but you guys don’t know this—my wife wants to come work with you.

    Simon: [Laughter]

    Shimel: Because she loves the company and the culture and the buzz that she gets when she’s around the Frogs that, you know, when she grows up, she wants to come work at JFrog.

    But all kidding aside, it’s a tremendous—you can’t come to a JFrog event, whether it be swampUP or SwamPower or Meetup or whatever without kinda feeling the love, right? Feeling that culture. And it’s an interesting dynamic. Take it from me—I go to a lot of conferences, I deal with a lot of companies. They don’t all have that. They don’t have that culture.

    So, I wanted to talk a little bit about—look, 2009, you started Artifactory, right? What was the idea on the culture, here? How do you instill that culture—not in the community, right now. Let’s talk about the company, because every high performing team ranked culture as important. How do you instill that pride to be a Frog, we’re all in this together, we’re making the world a better place? Who wants to answer?

    Simon: You want to start? You started this mess! [Laughter]

    Yoav Landman: So, yeah, Artifactory started before JFrog. So, Artifactory was there to solve a real pain, and we were all developers, and it’s our second—except for Shlomi—it’s our second venture.

    So, I guess this idea of solving pains, being very connected to the community, to customers, speaking a lot with customers, getting feedback from every engineer and every employee in JFrog that comes and says that they think that something should work differently or that we should develop something that may contribute to more success of our product is something that is instilled into the culture of JFrog.

    Shimel: Excellent.

    Simon: Yeah, we got lucky that everybody else who is working at JFrog is working for someone like him. So, that’s scratching our own itch. So, at the end of the day, you are a developer at JFrog and you hear about a customer having an issue, you feel it, because this is your job. You’re writing code, you’re a developer, and you know that what you are doing is impacting people. And so, this strong care about the customer and the strong feedback of the culture was here right from the beginning.

    And then Shlomi one day decided, “Oh, that’s too big, too full of a culture. I’m gonna try to write it down.” [Laughter]

    Shimel: [Laughter] And Shlomi, with all due respect, you like to deflect and you let him talk, but you’re the CEO. At some point, the buck stops here, right? You know, it’s important to you, but how do you build this culture? How do you get this loyalty, this feeling of buy-in from people?

    Ben Haim: That’s, you know, I’m listening to the question and I’m  getting excited like it’s my first day at JFrog. I think culture matters. Everybody knows that, everybody said that. But it’s hard to practice. It’s hard to maintain it for 10 years. And this—this goes back 18 years. I think I’m with these guys before I got married, and what you see in JFrog is that when you have the right culture, it’s viral. But it’s not just an internal move, it’s also reflecting outside of the company.

    And you spoke about Artifactory and how it started, and when we started, the only thing that we had was the technology that we believed in and ourselves. And it’s very hard to start a company when nobody understands what you do on the technical level, nobody understands what’s the pain. There is no budget line for it. So, the only thing that you can fight with is your team.

    Shimel: Right.

    Ben Haim: And just yesterday, as we set up this amazing conference here, I saw more than 70 JFrog employees. You know that we do our conferences ourselves.

    Shimel: Right.

    Ben Haim: No producers, it’s just us. Our team built it for the community. And I saw them here walking, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s building Artifactory or Xray or JFrog Pipelines or JFrog Distribution or swampUP—same culture, same values, comes over and over again as our one very big advantage.

    Shimel: Absolutely. But now—so, that in and of itself is fantastic, right? But now, there’s a second key ingredient to the success. How do we take that culture that we built at JFrog and let the community, infect the community with it, right, to use a security term? How do we transform the community with that same—not transform, infuse that community with that same culture, with that same passion?

    Because that’s something that always, again, it screams, right? It’s easy to see. And building that kinda community is not easy, because at the end of the day, today’s software world with open source and everything else is community, right? It’s all about—so how, is that something that’s done on purpose? If so, how? What do we do?

    Landman: I can try and start.

    Shimel: Go ahead, Yoav.

    Landman: So, part of being driven by input is also being very direct. And it all comes down to people—at the end of the day, it’s all people. So, the way that we interact with the community, the way that we interact with customers is not very much different than the way we interact internally in JFrog.

    So, by bonding with people, by investing in clear and open discussions with no fluff, I think that drives results, at the end of the day.

    Shimel: Fred?

    Simon: First of all, I don’t think it’s intentional. I mean, it’s just the way we are and the way—and it’s pure and it’s just true, okay? We truly care about the suffering of our customer, and the customer feels it. So, once he feels it and then he’s part of it—and sometimes, it’s a little bit disturbing for the customer, because the customer feels like he’s gonna get more help and better integration with the JFrog community and with JFrog than with his peers inside the company, because of the [Laughter]—

    Shimel: Yeah, exactly.

    Simon:  – some cultural clash between the company and JFrog. And so, by, you know, not saying, “Okay, whenever a customer is telling you something, just be compassionate”—we never told our employees, “Please be compassionate about the customer.” This is just, this is who we are, and this is what the—and they see, and the customer feels it, and he sees the effort we put to make sure that… And it’s like here, the communication, also. The effort of communication, the effort of knowledge, knowledge transfer. We are not shy on transferring what we know, what we need, what we did. It’s just—yeah, I think truth and natural truth is a [Cross talk].

    Shimel: So, the word that comes to my mind is genuine, right? You can’t fake this. It has to be genuine. And if it’s not genuine, people see through it and it smells, right? So, I think that’s a key ingredient of that, for sure.

    And the transfer, too—I mean, I’ve done, I don’t know, maybe 10 interviews, 12 interviews, maybe more today, to a lot of customers. And that knowledge transfer and sharing in this kinda—it’s huge to them.

    So, now—so, we’ve got the culture to the community. Now, we’re gonna talk, Yoav, you said Artifactory existed before there was a JFrog, right? It’s 10 years, right? In technology terms, that’s like dog years, it’s 90 years, you know? It’s almost 100 years old already.

    Landman: Frog’s years. [Laughter]

    Shimel: Frog years. How do you—so, obviously, the Artifactory today is not Artifactory, what it was.

    Landman: For sure.

    Shimel: JFrog today is not what JFrog was. We mentioned something things—JFrog Pipelines, there was the Shippable acquisition, Xray came out about two years ago now, right? Two, three years ago—Xray. JFrog today—let’s talk about the technology, the tools, the solutions. What are you most—you’re CTO, Yoav. What are you most proud of with that?

    Landman: Artifactory was the centerpiece and it still is. It’s the place where you put—we call it the golden bits. It’s what you’re going to, at the end of the day, put in production, right? But the world has changed dramatically since Artifactory was written. It was just a very basic Maven remote proxy. And then other features came about, but the whole DevOps and the whole pipeline automation process that we’re seeing today within companies, it didn’t exist back then to the same level of automation.

    So, bringing in security into the pipeline is an integral part, with Shippable, making sure—we can maybe talk about this later—making sure that we can drive the pipeline, adding functionality to give you insights into the pipeline. These are all things that came along and are going to be injected into the pipeline from JFrog, from other companies, but this is the natural evolution. Artifactory is still the base of what you’re going to shift, but all the services around it is what makes JFrog a lot bigger and why it’s very different than what we started.

    Shimel: Fred, I wanna come to you in a second, but I have a follow up question for Yoav. So, Yoav, I think another great example is—so, in the last year, you announced you’re gonna start a repository for Go, yeah? And so, that’s an example of, you see what the community is doing. I spoke yesterday to a Microsoft fellow here who’s, like, their advocate for the Go community—so happy to be here because JFrog’s supporting him with that.

    Where does that come from? Like, where—the idea of saying, “Hey, we should do something for Go?”

    Landman: So, it comes from, I think, two angles. The first is purely technical, just being able to be there first. The other one is, I think, a little bit cultural, just being able to instill innovation into the company, even before the market adoption happens. And it kind of goes together. Both goals, they serve one another. So, we did the same, by the way, with Docker. With Docker, we had support for the Docker beta versions, even before Docker was a thing.

    And the same thing we wanted to do with Go, even when the standards were not that stable yet and we had to rewrite our implementation once the standards have stabilized. But yeah, this is the source of this motivation.

    Shimel: Fred, I wanna go to Liquid Software with you, right? So, it’s a book, we can probably have someone throw us a copy for a prop, if we can get Brian maybe get us a Liquid Software book over here, it’s right by Netta.

    But you’re one of the co-authors, Yoav, Baruch is one. So, that’s another concept, right? This whole concept of liquid software and what it is. Talk to us about that. What do we—where does that come from? How does that fit?

    Simon: Yeah, so the—by the way, where it goes to Go and all these kind of communities and things like that? The origin of manipulating software and trying to put software in production into an environment, we always try to manipulate it as boxes. A box where we put a bunch of software and we try to run it. And with the advent of releasing multiple ________ multiple versions and making all those services micro-micro-microservices—basically, the flow of those packages got higher and higher and the size of the packages got smaller and smaller.

    And so, instead of thinking about it in terms of ship management and supply chain management of shipping packages, it didn’t make sense any more. It was really, really a big burden on the tagging.

    And so, when you want to put a piece of software in production, you have the final run time, which is the software in the hands of your end user, the one that really, really wants to use it. And deploying software is actually easy. You just created a new piece of software, you just run it for the first time, and it’s quite easy, and then you run. What’s hard is to update it, okay? Deploying is easy, updating is hard. And the only way to update it is to get the new version. And if you keep thinking about it in terms of blocks, you’re stuck. You need to think about it in terms of pipes and liquid and this is the liquid software. Is that, as soon as you create a run time that can receive software, you need to think about all the pipes that you need to plug to get the liquid to it and to update it continuously.

    And it changed all the way to the developer. This is—it starts from the pressure from the end users from, like you said, your wife, your daughter or whatever that wants to get the latest software all the time without any, and it put the pressure all the way to the developer. And what’s funny in our environment is that it’s hard for a developer to do it correctly, and a lot of times they said, because they are used to it, when they interact with technology, actually, the developers are a lot more, first, reluctant to update software. If you see all the developers and their phones, iOS and Android, they have the most, the oldest version, the one that doesn’t update. [Laughter] And they want to control [Cross talk].

    Shimel: It’s the mechanic’s car.

    Simon: Yes, exactly. [Laughter]

    Shimel: Never drive the mechanic’s car.

    Simon: And so, for them, it’s not that complicated to do a complicated update. So, it really comes from the pressure from the market, and life is ________ is a really good, it’s life pushing it and so liquid software is gonna happen whenever it’s gonna happen.

    But the change that we need to push is to put the tools and the mechanism and the practices into the hands of the developer. Because it’s not that hard. It’s hard, it’s some work and stuff, but it’s not as impossible as the community of developers think.

    So, it’s a book, I highly recommend it.

    Shimel: Here’s the book. We’ve got the book, thanks to the folks offstage.

    Simon: But it kind of tried to remove this fear from the developer community of writing liquid software. It’s possible.

    Ben Haim: And, you know, Alan, I think that the experience of being in a very successful company for over eight years and not being able to explain what is it that we are doing, why it’s more than just managing your binaries, why it’s more than just providing you with a better repository. And when Fred came up with this phrase, liquid software, it was one presentation that everybody in JFrog understood and immediately aligned to it. Because this is actually what we believe in. And when you go and raise your Series D and you say—

    Shimel: Which was this year.

    Ben Haim: – this last year, last October, seven months ago. And when we said—nine months ago.

    Shimel: Yeah. [Laughter]

    Ben Haim: When we said, “We are the liquid software company,” we had all kinds of eyebrows moving, and people are asking us more and more about that, because they start to understand that this is beyond just the vision of JFrog. This is where the world is going. We are just one of the enablers of the liquid software world.

    Shimel: Absolutely. So, first of all, I still can’t explain to my family what I do for a living, but that’s another story.

    Ben Haim: [Laughter] The story of my life.

    Shimel: Yeah. But, you know, in some ways, this is also the story of JFrog, because 9 years ago, 10 years ago, Artifactory, I would’ve told you, “Liquid software? What is it? What do you”—stop.

    Ben Haim: Yeah. Stop with the drugs.

    Shimel: Right. But yet, the kernel of what is liquid software according to you was there in Artifactory 10, 11 years ago. Yeah.

    Landman: The essence is.

    Shimel: Yeah. and so, it’s—you know, I learned once, what we do in technology is, 99 percent of the time evolutionary, not revolutionary. And so, this is the revolution of it.

    So, I’d like to, now, if we can—and Liquid Software is available, you can get it. The book’s on Amazon. I think it’s on—

    Simon: Audible. It’s Audible, also.

    Shimel: Yep. We had it on devopsy.kinsta.cloud on a link, too, at one time. We probably still do, obviously.

    But I wanna now turn a little bit, you mentioned D round was a couple dollars, 165,000,000—that’s not even shekels, dollars.

    Ben Haim: [Laughter] It sounds better in shekels, by the way.

    Shimel: Yeah. It’s like the speed of light. But you know what, when you raised—Yoav and I were talking earlier—you raise that kind of money, with a lot of money comes a lot of responsibility, a lot of expectations. Where does JFrog go from here, right, and how do you chart that course, right? As a CEO, CTO, developer advocate, technology—how do we, where do you, where do you go? How do you know where to go, right? You’ve got tremendous resources now at your disposal, probably more than you might have dreamed you’d have to do.

    Where do we go and how do chart that course?

    Ben Haim:  So, I’ll try to answer that from a high level and then, of course, Fred and Yoav can take it to the technology solution. I think that JFrog has done something really big. And when you see what happened in the world, it’s beyond the developer. It’s beyond the people who are actually using our solution. It’s the destination that was changed. And what people expect to have is a fast and fluid software update. And if JFrog, with 5,000 customers today and growing fast, can be the company that powers this need, then I think we have a very big story.

    So, when we raised our money—you know, when you raise such an amount with such an evaluation, you also understand that the dream about M&A and exit is kind of pushed away and the list of acquired got changed to maybe three or four companies.

    Shimel: Very small—a handful.

    Ben Haim: So, you have to go and ask your wife about it, because this is 10 years, together 30 years of investment that our family was part of this journey. And I asked Donna, my wife, and I said, “Donna, you understand that there will be no exit soon. We have to go all the way—all the way towards it.” And the answer that I got is that, “If this is really what you say it is, if it’s really changing the world, if it’s really about electricity and water and aircraft and cars and everything you do, I’m so excited about it, and I’m not even a technologist, then you guys should go after it.”

    So, I think we have made the right choice, and you’re right, there is a lot of responsibility here. It’s a responsibility not just to our VCs, but also to our employees that trust us and follow us, and also to our customers—

    Shimel: And the community.

    Ben Haim: – that comes and uses it and over and over again, we are growing at 150 new logos per month—new logos per month. These are people that adopt this solution and say, “This is what we are going to do in the next 10 to 20 years. We are making software liquid.”

    Landman: So, JFrog for a long time is not just the sum of the founders, it’s much, much bigger than that, and we have wonderful people in the company that leaped forward with JFrog and take the company forward, basically, for us and for the other investors.

    One thing that you have to understand is that, today, JFrog is taking the responsibility of serving huge organizations and our end customers are also sharing this responsibility of serving the automation for huge organizations, and the automation patterns that we are seeing, they are not constant. They are changing and they keep evolving over time.

    So, this is kind of great, an ever growing challenge for us to develop a new set of tools, a new set of solutions, new pains to cure. To tell you that we exactly know what the next pains are going to be—we don’t. If we would, it would probably be too boring to continue going, like Shlomi said. But this is basically what drives us and keeps us committed to this responsibility.

    Simon: Yeah, still a ton of work to do. I mean, the liquid software vision, there’s still a lot, a lot, a lot to do. And like Yoav said, the responsibility that we have as being a critical piece of keeping those pipes, making sure they don’t leak, making sure nobody’s injecting stuff into it. And making it happen and making the water system trusted and the software delivery trusted is a huge amount of work, responsibility, and systems that we have to create on the way, we have to build, and we have to scale to worldwide—really, worldwide impact and environment.

    So, you can say that 160 is a lot of money, and when I see the amount of things that need to be done, maybe not. [Laughter]

    Shimel: Yeah. Well, there’s always more out there. Guys, we’re way over time, but I wanted to end it with this. I sold my first company in 1997, and I sold it to, well, a guy named Brad Feld who’s a pretty well-known venture capitalist himself. But his mentor was an older Jewish man, Len Fassler—a little older, he was like my grandpa. I couldn’t negotiate against him.

    Ben Haim: [Laughter] No, it’s impossible.

    Shimel: It was like negotiating with your grandpa. But Len had good—he did several billion dollar companies, rollups and good stuff. And I then worked for him and we did 30 acquisitions in 36 months, and we wound up taking the company public in the dot cot days.

    And one of the things he always said to every founding group, whether we bought the company or not, was, “Any time you can build a company that someone’s willing to reach into their pocket to invest in and write you a check, you have a lot to be proud of,” right? To write a check for $165,00,000.00—that’s plenty to be proud of. But even beyond the money, when you look out at swampUP, when you look out at all those Frogs’ faces, you guys have a lot to be proud of, so congratulations.

    Ben Haim: Thank you very much.

    Shimel: Thanks for joining us.

    Ben Haim: Thank you.

    Shimel: And continued success. Hey, we’re gonna wrap it here in San Francisco from JFrog swampUP, this is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and the Digital Anarchist.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: JFrog Acquires Shippable

    DevOps Chat: JFrog Acquires Shippable

    The big news in DevOps today was the acquisition of Shippable by JFrog. This adds a CI/CD solution to the JFrog Enterprise+ platform and further expands JFrog’s end-to-end DevOps offering beyond Artifactory and more.

    In this DevOps Chat, we speak with Shippable CEO Avi Cavale, JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim and JFrog VP of Marketing Ayally Goldschmidt about the thinking behind this acquisition and JFrog’s plans going forward.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. Today’s DevOps Chat has some breaking news. It was just announced this morning—JFrog has acquired or merged with Shippable in a rather, you know, this is big news within the DevOps world, and we’re very, very happy to be joined by the CEOs of both Shippable and JFrog. From Shippable, we have Avi Cavale, and from JFrog, of course, our friend, Shlomi Ben Haim. And joining us from JFrog is Ayalla Goldschmidt, who really runs marketing at JFrog. I’m not sure of your exact title, Yes, Ayalla?

    Ayalla Goldschmidt: VP of Marketing, thank you, Alan.

    Shimel: VP of Marketing—thank you for joining us. So, first of all, to all three of you, congratulations, Mazel Tov as they say in Seattle. [Laughter]

    Goldschmidt: Thank you, thank you.

    Shlomi Ben Haim: [Laughter] Thank you, Alan.

    Shimel: Thank you. And so, you know, Avi, let’s turn it over to you first. I think a lot of our audience is familiar with JFrog, and most of our audience have heard of Shippable, but let’s just lay that right out there. What’s Shippable about?

    Avi Cavale: Shippable is about a modern CI and CD platform. So, our focus is to streamline the delivery—packaging and delivery of software, and that’s kind of where we are focused on.

    Shimel: Fantastic. So, Shlomi, I think I already know the answer, but I’m gonna ask you—why Shippable for JFrog?

    Ben Haim: That’s a great opening question. Actually, Alan, you know JFrog very well. You know that everything starts with the culture, and when we met Avi and the team, it looked like we’d found the brother Frogs in a different company. So, for us, it was just to make sure that the technology and the strategy are aligned. And when we looked at the technology and the next generation of CI/CD that was built by the Shippable team with Avi’s leadership, it was a no-brainer for us.

    Shimel: Absolutely. But the other thing I think we should mention is, you know, JFrog, many people know JFrog from Artifactory, maybe Xray, you know, point solutions that we can call up. Artifactory is a whole platform in and of itself.

    But, really, the big move for JFrog—and if I’m wrong, correct me; Ayalla, you’re the Marketing person—the big move for JFrog was, you know, this JFrog enterprise platform. And, to me, if you’re gonna have an enterprise platform in the DevOps space, you need that CI/CD pipeline kinda delivery capability.

    So, to me, you know, this really kinda helps fulfill that vision of the JFrog platform. Yeah, no, wrong?

    Goldschmidt: Yeah, that is exactly right, Alan. That’s the vision that we have for it. Obviously, we’ll be doing a lot of work here in the coming weeks to clarify the roadmap and the timeline, but you hit the nail on the head. That’s the value that we’re seeing for our customers and what they’re looking to, what they’re asking us for as far as, you know, we love JFrog, we have very happy customers, they love what we do, and they’re looking to take it to the next level.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, let me ask my next question to Avi and Shlomi, and that is, you know, I guess it’s part of the maturation of the DevOps market where all—you know, there are now, everybody wants to offer the whole enchilada. Do you know what I mean?

    Ben Haim: [Laughter]

    Shimel: People aren’t content any more just offering a piece of it, we wanna offer it all, that whole SDLC, we’re gonna help you throughout that life cycle. It seems everyone is pointing towards that, and the money—look, JFrog, it’s no secret, raised $165 million. Some of your competitors have raised also eight figures. That’s where the smart money’s going, towards companies that are building out this end-to-end DevOps framework.

    Avi, is that what you saw at Shippable, and is that what attracted you guys to want to do this deal with JFrog?

    Cavale: Yeah, I think what we are seeing is that there is one thing which is very critical for customers. It’s like—yes, they want the whole enchilada as a single platform, but at the same point in time, they also want a platform that is open, and they want to make sure that they can plug in the tools that they like in certain places.

    So, of course, they want to see the native capability end to end, but extensibility is also super important. And so, what we kind of saw with what JFrog was doing and what we were doing also was that we were being open to everything. I mean, yes, we want to have a standard of how we think about an end to end platform, but we want to be open and make sure we embrace all the practices that developers want to do and extend the platform to DevOps capabilities.

    Shimel: Absolutely. So, Shlomi, Avi makes a very good point here, and that also goes to the heart of JFrog. One of the things about JFrog is that they play nice with everyone, basically, right? You could pick whatever CI/CD platform you wanna work with or whatever—you know, whether it’s Puppet or Chef or the Red Hat software, you know, JFrog works with everyone, so to speak.

    But now, you have an in-house CI/CD solution, so how do you balance that in your go to market?

    Ben Haim: That’s a great question, Alan. I think that what we’ve started to see in the market for more than 12 months now is that DevOps is maturing and the organization and enterprises are looking to get an end to end solution, yet the driving force of DevOps production is still in the hands of the developers, which, obviously, would love to see the freedom of choice and the best of breed options kind of open to them.

    So, you are right. Our universal approach is something that always led us. We always provided our users with the power of choosing their tools pack, and it will still be the case.

    However, on the JFrog platform, what we call the enterprise class, we want to make sure that we take artifacts seriously, from the moment you build it from code all the way to production. And, together with Shippable automation power, together with the integration and the visibility that technology like Shippable can provide to the platform, I think we will be able to combine the two, to allow a better universal approach. So, you can still use your Jenkins, your CircleCI, your other DevOps tool sets. But you will also have a JFrog end to end solution that takes you all the way from code to production.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, Avi, you know, how do you—I’ll reverse, mirror that question back to you, right? How do you see the Shippable team, the Shippable product fitting into that JFrog Enterprise Plus, you know, the Artifactory platform, all of the different tools that JFrog and services that JFrog is putting together—how do you make sure you fit in there?

    Cavale: So, as Shlomi mentioned, right, what is happening is—so, the artifact is something that is immutable, and that’s something that you build and you want to kind of take it through your entire value chain of how you deliver software to your end customers or end devices or whatever they might be.

    The issue is that, if you don’t have the pipes to kind of control that in a high fidelity fashion, you lose a lot of information as you go from stage to stage. Because you’re leaving it up to the customer to make sure all the data is being persisted and you’re keeping all the hooks so that eventually what you’re really trying to do is, you want to be able to go to something that’s running on the end device and be able to track, if there are problems, what are all the pieces that went into actually building that piece of software that is running there?

    So, losing that ability to connect that entire life cycle, all the way from code to the point where it’s running on a device is a very critical piece of DevOps. And what we see is, that kind of, now, our marriage to the whole Artifactory plus Xray and plus distribution, all of those pieces now can be connected through a common pipeline and we’re making sure that we have high fidelity information exchange as things move through this work flow end to end. And I think that’s kind of the critical thing that we are adding to the product.

    Shimel: Excellent. Ayalla, a question for you—you look at, all of a sudden, you’re embarrassed by the riches of JFrog in terms of their product, right, in terms of the product that you have to work with, the products that you can bring to market. But at the same time, at some level, it’s a double-edged sword from a marketing perspective, right? You have so much now, too, that you need to market, that you need—how do you make sort of a holistic message for market that includes all of these pieces and how they fit together and how, if you don’t want to use all the pieces, you don’t have to, either?

    Goldschmidt: You know what, I feel like the luckiest marketing person on the planet. And, you know, Shlomi promised me when I joined this company a little over a year ago that there will be no shortage of news, and he has delivered.

    Shimel: [Laughter]

    Goldschmidt: So, since I’ve joined, the acquisitions, our Series D announcement, and of course, all of the new technologies that we’ve supported along the way, and the most recent exciting edition of support for Go and Go Center, we love all of these audiences and we do actually put in a big effort in tailoring our message to make sure that we’re communicating with a developer first mindset, and that seems to be working for us.

    So, you know, until today at JFrog, everything we’ve built has been through an inbound marketing funnel with an inside sales team. We haven’t had field people knocking on doors, and that seems to be working great for us, and now we’re ready to take it to the next level. But we’ll always remain developer first.

    Shimel: Excellent. Let me—Avi, let me ask you some sort of typical M&A kind of questions. So, is your whole team staying on as part of this acquisition?

    Cavale: Absolutely, and we’re all joining the JFrog family, and so there is really no change to the business and how we are running it. And I usually tell my team that I have a new boss, that’s all—nothing else is changing, and we’re gonna keep marching towards the vision, and all we have is an opportunity to broaden that vision that JFrog brings to the table and we are part of a much bigger family than what we were before.

    Shimel: Excellent. And so, Avi, what do you see particularly as your role going forward, here?

    Cavale: Sorry, was that for me?

    Shimel: Yes, specifically you—what’s your role going forward? Is it just heading up Shippable? I mean, I’ve been in your role, to tell you the truth. I’ve had my company acquired more than once. And, while you still want to maintain your team and run the team, you also need to integrate now, right? You’re part of an executive team at JFrog that has—I will tell you, I think one of the best cultures in the DevOps world or in the tech world, period.

    You know, how do you see yourself? How do you see this changing your role? It’s more than just having a new boss.

    Cavale: I think the way—I’m actually in Israel right now, and we have already started collaborating. So, one of the things that I actually see is that the team is like, it’s all about brainstorming, quick integration. So, my role is to make sure that I’m delivering the products that JFrog’s customers love as well as most importantly the trust that it actually runs the way it needs to be running. And we’ve focused on the CI/CD aspect of it; nothing is changing from that perspective.

    But what I have now is more brains who are kind of helping me think through what we need to actually do so that we are focused on the enterprise and driving towards that, so that’s kind of how I see myself, as part of the team.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, Shlomi, let me ask you, now—what’s next? What worlds are left to conquer? What pieces of the puzzle are missing? What’s next?

    Ben Haim: You know, Alan, I’m sitting here and listening to Ayalla and Avi and this is great. And from people from outside JFrog, they might think that JFrog is trying to complete the pipeline with all kinds of pieces.

    But the one great feedback that I’m getting from the community is that there is no question mark. People understand what are we doing, it all makes sense. Every tier, every brick that we put on the DevOps wall sounds like the right, next logical step.

    But we are the binaries people, and we will stay the binaries people. We will just make sure that this pipe is completed, and when we speak about the liquid software vision, when we speak about continuous update and solving the pain for the DevOps world, we are taking it seriously, and, as you see, we are super determined to complete our mission.

    What next? We have to stay focused, we have to be a great solution to our customers and users as a community. We are very active in the community, providing them with more tools and more capabilities. It is now our responsibility to make sure that Shippable is fully integrated and the user experience is smooth and fun to use, and as Ayalla mentioned, thinking of the developer first and not the full platform story, but the user experience and the fun and simple-to-use solution.

    Shimel: Excellent, excellent. Alright. Guys, we’re about out of time, I think. We’re probably over time. But again, Avi, congratulations. Welcome to the JFrog family.

    Cavale: Thank you.

    Shimel: It’s an amazing culture, and I’m sure you probably already know that, but you’ll continue to find out. Shlomi, my friend, congratulations to you. Keep up the great work. I can’t wait to see you.

    Ben Haim: Alan, thank you.

    Shimel: Thank you.

    Ben Haim: Thank you so much, partner. Thank you so much.

    Shimel: Alright. And Ayalla, always a pleasure.

    Goldschmidt: [Cross talk]

    Shimel: You, my friend, have work ahead of you now. [Laughter]

    Goldschmidt: [Laughter] Yes, I do. The work is just beginning.

    Shimel: Good for you.

    Goldschmidt: Thanks for having us on.

    Shimel: Alright. So, big news today—JFrog acquires Shippable, and another brick in the wall, as Shlomi mentioned. I tend to think of it as more of a Pink Floyd song than any political thing, but it certainly is continuing this DevOps maturation.

    Guys, congratulations. We’ll see you all soon. And for now, that’s a wrap on this DevOps Chat. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Have a great day, everyone.

    — Alan Shimel

  • JFrog acquires Shippable, Delivers Complete DevOps Pipeline Automation From Code to Production

    JFrog platform incorporates best-of-breed CI/CD technology to drive enterprise DevOps forward, provides users with an integrated DevOps solution

     

    SUNNYVALE, California, February, 2019 – JFrog, the DevOps technology leader known for enabling liquid software via continuous update flows, is announcing the strategic acquisition of Shippable, a continuous integration and DevOps automation platform company. Shippable’s portfolio of cloud-native and Kubernetes-ready CI/CD solutions will be incorporated into the JFrog platform, creating a complete, integrated DevOps pipeline solution.

    With expertise in CI/CD pipeline automation and a drive to make DevOps an “assembly line” for software development, Shippable technology provides a leap forward for JFrog’s DevOps platform, Enterprise+. Coupled with JFrog’s industry-leading artifact repository managementbinary management, distribution, and security vulnerability scanning solutions, Shippable technology will allow JFrog customers to automate their development processes from the moment code is committed through to production.

    “We’re immensely excited to welcome Shippable into JFrog, and eager to convert their expertise and products into unmatched value for JFrog customers,” said Shlomi Ben Haim, Co-founder and CEO of JFrog. “The modern DevOps landscape requires ever-faster delivery with more and more automation. Shippable’s outstanding hybrid and cloud native technologies will incorporate yet another best-of-breed solution into the JFrog platform. Coupled with our commitments to universality and freedom of choice, developers can expect a superior out-of-the-box DevOps platform with the greatest flexibility to meet their DevOps needs.”

    Following a Series D funding round of $165 million announced in October of 2018, JFrog’s acquisition of Shippable illustrates a promise to rapidly expand the JFrog technology portfolio across the DevOps pipeline. Coupled with the recent announcement of JFrog’s incorporation of VulnDB security intelligence data from Risk Based Security, JFrog is now offering the most automated, complete, open and secure DevOps solution in the market.

    “We’re thrilled to join the JFrog family and further the vision around Liquid Software,” said Avi Cavale, founder and CEO of Shippable. “Shippable users and customers have long enjoyed our next-generation technology, but now will have access to leading security, binary management and other high-powered enterprise tools in the end-to-end JFrog Platform. This is truly exciting, as the combined forces of JFrog and Shippable can make full DevOps automation from code to production a reality.”

    Founded in 2013, Shippable’s mission – complementary to JFrog’s Liquid Software vision – is to help companies ship code faster and focus on innovation by removing all friction in the software development and delivery workflows. Shippable employees will join JFrog global teams, with the first technology integrations being released in the JFrog Enterprise+ platform in the summer of 2019, with full technical integration completing in Q3 of 2019.

    About

    About JFrog – the Liquid Software Company

    JFrog is on a mission to enable continuous updates through liquid software, empowering developers to code high-quality applications that securely flow to end-users with zero downtime. JFrog is the creator of Artifactory, the heart of the end-to-end Universal DevOps platform for automating, managing, securing, distributing, and monitoring all type of binaries. JFrog products are available as open-source, on-premise, and on the cloud on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. As the leading universal, highly available enterprise DevOps Solution, the JFrog platform empowers customers with trusted and expedited software releases from code-to-production. Trusted by more than 4,700 customers, the world’s top brands, such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Uber, VMware, and Spotify depend on JFrog to manage their binaries for their mission-critical applications. JFrog is privately held with offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. Learn more at jfrog.com.

    About Shippable:

    Founded in 2013 and backed by Madrona Venture Group, Shippable’s mission is to help their more than 400 customers ship code faster and focus on innovation by removing all friction in the software development and delivery workflows. With its hybrid automation platform, Shippable helps organizations easily achieve Continuous Delivery, optimize DevOps and enable Continuous Improvement. Shippable is Venture Capital-backed, with offices in North America and Asia.

  • DevOps Chat: JFrog Announces $165 Million Funding Round

    DevOps Chat: JFrog Announces $165 Million Funding Round

    shlomie ben haim JFrogIn what may be the biggest round of investment yet in the DevOps space, JFrog announced today that it has closed its Series D round of funding totaling $165 million. The round was led by a new investor, Insight Venture Partners. Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director of Insight, will join JFrog’s board.

    JFrog, the developers of Artifactory and other artifact-related software, has recently taken a higher mission to develop a platform named JFrog EnterprisePlus, a first-of-its-kind, universal DevOps platform. According to JFrog, the money raised “will drive JFrog product innovation, support rapid expansion into new markets and accelerate both organic and inorganic growth.”

    The company had raised something in the area of $65 million in previous rounds. It has also made several acquisitions to add both new functionality and geographical reach.

    As readers of devopsy.kinsta.cloud are aware, we have closely followed JFrog’s progress over the years, as the company represents a good example of how vendors are growing and establishing themselves in the DevOps market.

    We had a chance to sit down and speak with JFrog co-founder and CEO, Shlomi Ben Haim, about this latest news. Our conversation can be listened to below, followed by a transcript of our chat. Enjoy and congrats to the JFrog team.

    Audio

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. It’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud. You’re listening to a DevOps Chat, and we’re here breaking some big news this morning. The folks over at JFrog, makers of Artifactory and several other great projects and products, have announced what may be one of the largest rounds ever in the DevOps space, $165 million, I believe, but joining us is Shlomi Ben Haim, co-founder, CEO of JFrog, and he can tell us all about it. Shlomi, welcome.

    Shlomi Ben Haim: Hey, Alan. Great to meet you again. Thank you for having me.

    Shimel: Thank you, my pleasure. So Shlomi, as I mentioned earlier, exciting, big news coming from JFrog today. Did I get the number right, $165 million round?

    Ben Haim: Yes. [Laughs] You got it right. It’s $165 million, series D.

    Shimel: So first of all, Shlomi, congratulations. You know, raising any amount of money is never easy; raising this kind of money is truly an unbelievable task I can’t even imagine. So congratulations to you and Fred and Yoav and the whole team at JFrog on this accomplishment.

    Ben Haim: Thank you very much, Alan. We are not taking it for granted and we are very, very excited. Thank you.

    Shimel: Good. So Shlomi, I understand Insight Venture partners led the round, is that correct?

    Ben Haim: That’s correct. Insight Venture led our series D. Jeff Horing will be the partner that will join our board.

    Shimel: Excellent. And talk to us a little bit – they led but your existing investors participated. Any other new investors?

    Ben Haim: Yes. So this round actually was one of the best experiences [laughs] we ever had in the landscape of fundraising. We had awesome partners reaching out to us throughout the, I don’t know, last three years, and we started to build a relationship with all of them. And one of the things that we wanted to make sure in this round is that we would have funds that understand late stage and understand mature companies with mature products in the market, and this is how we met Insight and some other great VCs. Together with Insight in this round, Spark Capital joined us with Alex Clayton and Geodesic, that you probably know, that have some presence in Japan. Other than that, Battery really supported this round. Battery is one of our current investors alongside Sapphire and Scale and Vintage and Bell Capital. Actually, most of our investors joined this round again.

    Shimel: Excellent. Excellent, excellent, excellent. So Shlomi, you know, beyond the big number, talk to us a little bit about what does it mean for JFrog?

    Ben Haim: Well that’s a good question because we were in this place when the company’s doing great and you are very – you are going very fast and very efficiently and the market is going, so it’s not just your business, it’s the whole market, the whole DevOps market is booming, and the fruits of our labors were something that we felt every day with all of our six products. And just three months ago we released a platform, the Enterprise Plus JFrog platform, which is an end-to-end solution to all kinds of binary, and we knew that this is the right timing to go big on the market and take it down because JFrog – as people are telling us, JFrog is everywhere. It’s about to be the standout of the DevOps industry. And now that we are planning some big things to the market we needed to support that with the right amount of funds and to build a great company.

    Shimel: Sure. And, you know, Shlomi, we just spoke last week; you guys had acquired a company that was gonna help with delivering DevOps professional services, Trainologic. You’ve expanded all over the world, obviously, or are expanding, but really this brings a whole different scale to the equation, you know? We’re not talking about just opening outposts; with this kind of, you know, capital you can afford to make some major bets, right? Where do you see sort of major bets being made, major moves being made? Not just geographically, Shlomi, but in terms of focus areas?

    Ben Haim: Yeah. So Ana and I will humbly say that we have raised the highest amount in the DevOps history, not just to create the news item but to create history. So JFrog’s vision is to make sure that software updates become liquid. Software updates should run like water in pipes. And with the product alignment that we got to, with the Enterprise Plus release, now that we have an end-to-end solution with the universal DevOps that keeps the freedom of choice in the hands of the developers, we are certain that this, alongside the presence we have in the market – we have over 4,500 customers – we are positive that JFrog will be the company or at least have the potential to be the company behind all the software updates in the world.

    And this is the real pain of DevOps, this is what DevOps is trying to solve; we are trying to get software from A to B, and JFrog is following all the edges and support this binary flow and software distribution within our customer’s data centers and different sides. So I think that with this vision, to be the company behind all the software updates in the world, you have to dream big, you have to build big, you have to expand. You have to expand not just geographically as you mentioned, you have to expand with technology so you will be able to support whatever needs that will be raised, and you also have to take it seriously. It comes with a lot of responsibility.

    Shimel: It sure does, it sure does. Shlomi, you know, they say a rising tide lifts all boats, and certainly, you know, look, we saw in the last – just this past month, GitLab raised $100 million round and $1 billion-plus valuation. We saw GitHub not that long ago purchased for $7 billion from Microsoft. And now we see JFrog with $165 million raised. What does this mean for the DevOps market in general, right? What does this mean for the DevOps market I mean for other companies and stuff like that?

    Ben Haim: Well, you and I still remember the days that DevOps was not even a term, right? And of course there was no budget line called DevOps. So I think that the industry realized and acknowledged the fact that the biggest challenge is not the challenge of software; it’s the challenge of fast. We have to do things fast and we have to combine the human power with the machine power, and this is what DevOps is all about. You are right; this year was an amazing year for companies in this domain. So GitLab I think raised this $100 million last month, but these started with Xebia and then Mesosphere and then Sonatype and GitLab and of course the giant acquisition of GitHub, which I’m not sure if it’s DevOps or dev, but in any ways, same neighborhood. And this is exactly what I’m talking about.

    The world belongs to those who are pushing software from build to production and we are all as consumers expect software to be up-to-date at any place, anytime in a secure way, and this is what we are doing. This is JFrog’s mission, and I think that VCs acknowledge that. I think that the market acknowledge that. I think that if you’re looking at Atlassian, which is for me the best example of building something big in the world of software infrastructure, if you look at their market cap we all see the same sign and the sign says this is going to be a big market.

    Shimel: Yeah. It’s a huge market. So Shlomi, you know, with this kind of raise, we also have the opportunity to maybe move out of the comfort zone. So this is an entrepreneurial dilemma; do you double down on what you’re doing, doing well and do it better, or do you look to maybe in adjacent areas or that blend in nicely with what you’re doing now but expand the offering? You know, you drive the vision. You know, it’s tempting but also discipline requires focus on what you do well. What do you think about that?

    Ben Haim: I think that it’s maybe the most popular entrepreneurial dilemma, but one very smart investor told me once, “I’m not here to invest in what he did; I am here to invest in what you’re going to do together with me.” And I’m still taking this very important sentence very seriously. We built a great business and a very solid business with awesome foundation and I think, Alan, you know that, the market knows that and, you know, giant companies are investing in JFrog every day. We are growing at a pace of 100 new logos as month, so we are very honored and very pleased to see that what we have created is growing, but it’s not even the tip of the iceberg. The whole idea of pushing software from the development machine to whatever edge is a big mission because it comes with high availability and it comes with a universal solution and it comes with security and it comes with automation and scheduling.

    And you start to see the consolidation in the DevOps market; people start to understand that you need a code repository – this is a very important piece – and you need an artifact repository – and this is a very important piece – and on top of those two you start to build the layers of DevOps. So we are taking this field by field and layer by layer, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. We will follow any edge and I think that it’s just the beginning. We didn’t even start to think about DevOps for IoT, which will also be a big thing five years from now.

    Shimel: I think maybe even before five years.

    Ben Haim: I agree with you, yeah.

    Shimel: So let me turn it another direction. You know, one of the things I personally admire about JFrog is the culture that you and the team have built there. It’s great, it’s exciting, it’s energized. I can only imagine the buzz internally as a company around the race. Why don’t you share with our audience a little bit of insight. How has the team there reacted to the news?

    Ben Haim: So, Alan, I – you touch [laughs] the very special, you know, spot in my heart when you speak about our team. I always thought that it’s great to build a company of 50 people or 100 people because you can preserve the culture, but now we are over 400 people and some of the folks are, you know, a result of M&A and acquisitions that other companies – great companies that joined us, and still we can protect what we call the JFrog codex and our culture and I’m very, very pleased to see it. Obviously, we didn’t share it yet with all the folks – we are going to do it on the third, on Wednesday – but we shared it with all the management, different tiers of the management.

    The excitement is through the roof mainly because of the fact that everyone that walks in JFrog – you know what, not everyone – but 90 percent of whoever walks into JFrog is so humble and, you know, so focused on the day-to-day mission, and when something like this is happening it’s just – you know, it’s more than shocking news. It’s going to the mirror and look at the reflection and say, hey, we did something great and we built it together. And we say in JFrog, once we leap forward you won’t go back, but it’s not about that. It’s about once you leap forward together with your team you won’t go back, and I think that this is the significance of JFrog.

    Shimel: Excellent, excellent. Shlomi, also – look, you spend most of your time I know now in the states, but JFrog is originally an Israeli company. This has also gotta be big news in Israel I would imagine. I don’t know if an Israeli company – I mean Israeli companies have had big exits, but this kind of raise, and you’re talking to us today from Israel. Can you give us a sense on that, of what does it mean within the Israeli tech industry, which is, you know, such a hot, hot space, but this has got to, you know, make some noise there, right?

    Ben Haim: Yeah, absolutely. Well this is – you know, these are big numbers for any market, like I don’t know any other company in the landscape of DevOps that’s raised this amount and with these great partners, so I think it’s big news everywhere, but yes, you’re very correct. And, you know, the Israeli market, it will be a big news item, though there are companies in Israel that raised about $100 million, some of them even above $200 million, but there is something very interesting happening in the industry, the high tech industry in Israel. We were used to known for our technology, you know, the Israeli technologies and all the startups booming in this very small country, and then for products – so you heard about companies like Waze and so on – and now I see more and more Israeli entrepreneurs that are daring to dream big and to say “I’m going to build my own company to be public and to last forever,” and to stay there and not just in the next five years and then get bought by one of the giants, but it’s going to stay relevant for the rest of the years. And I see more and more Israeli founders thinking that way, raising money from late-stage funds, raising money with an IPO in mind – you know what? Not as a goal but as a milestone. It’s something that will structure the company to be bigger and better. And I’m very excited to be part of this industry as well.

    Shimel: Absolutely, and you should be. So Shlomi, right there, I gotta ask; is that – is an IPO versus an acquisition the goal, the end game here or you’ll take that as it comes?

    Ben Haim: You know, we think about the next act. For us, IPO is a very important milestone. It’s another way to raise money; to spend not from the funds but from the public, but it’s something that we’re looking at. Jacob Shulman, our CFO, joined us from Mellanox, which is a public company. We know what we are doing but it’s a milestone. If you ask me what is my biggest challenge, I want JFrog to be able to cross the $1 billion threshold before 2025. This is a very, very long run goal but, well, we are already at 10 years old JFrog so you can bet on us, keep your eyes open, and we will make it happen.

    Shimel: Excellent. All right. Shlomi, we’re about out of time, but let me again say congratulations, mazel tov; just a real accomplishment here. But you know what? One thing I’ve learned with raising money, Shlomi, is it’s not anyone does you a favor. People don’t give you money ’cause you’re a nice guy or they want – you know, they do it because they see a way to make more money. So to me this represents more than anything a tremendous vote of confidence in what you’re doing there and what the potential return on investment is, right? So for that alone, really hats off to you and the team. I wish JFrog, you know, and you and the team fantastic success going forward. We’re all gonna be watching. Make us proud. And thanks for talking to us today.

    Ben Haim: Thank you so much, Alan. I really appreciate what you do for us and what you do for the DevOps industry. It’s not taken for granted. Thank you so much for all your time and for giving me the opportunity –

    Shimel: Yeah, my pleasure.

    Ben Haim: – to speak about this again. Thank you.

    Shimel: We will for sure. Shlomi Ben Haim, co-founder, CEO, JFrog just announced $165 million round led by Insight Venture Partners. Fantastic news. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. You’ve just listened to another DevOps Chat. Have a great day.

    — Alan Shimel

  • VMware Cloud on AWS Will Bring DevOps Issues to a Head

    VMware Cloud on AWS Will Bring DevOps Issues to a Head

    Now that instances of VMware are starting to become available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a DevOps ecosystem is starting to emerge around the management of applications workloads moving into and out of AWS.

    Among the more than 4,500 applications that VMware claims already support VMware Cloud on AWS are those from Blue Medora, CA Technologies, Chef, Cloudbees, Dynatrace, Jfrog, Puppet, SaltStack and the Ansible arm of Red Hat.

    VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told attendees at the recent VMworld 2017 conference that VMware and AWS are just now scratching the surface of what they plan to accomplish together. AWS CEO Andy Jassy added that, unlike other alliances, which consisted mainly of marketing, engineers at both companies are working closely together to deliver VMware globally across all AWS availability zones. At present, VMware Cloud on AWS is available in the AWS availability zone hosted in Portland, Oregon. The service soon will be extended to the east coast of the United States, followed by rest of the world over the course of 2018.

    The availability of VMware Cloud on AWS should force several DevOps issues within enterprise IT organizations that have deployed the VMware stack of software mainly on-premises. Many of those organizations have also been employing public clouds such as AWS. But because those environments are based on different hypervisors, it was never easy to migrate workloads between the two platforms. There are plenty of options for running VMware software in the cloud, but because AWS is the largest provider of public cloud services, there are many customers who want to seamlessly move workloads between their on-premises IT environments and AWS via a common stack of VMware software.

    In many organizations the desire to shift applications workloads into AWS will bring many DevOps issues to a head, as VMware and AWS use has occurred in independently of each other. There could be many workloads running on each platform, but for all intents and purposes, IT organizations have managed both platforms in isolation. Now that VMware is becoming available on AWS, all the challenges associated with moving workloads between a public and private cloud come to the fore.

    Most of those DevOps issues will be focused first on moving some classes of workloads running on VMware into AWS. Application workloads that don’t need to run constantly will be among the primary candidates followed by a slew of data protection applications that will enable IT organizations to back up and archive massive amounts of data inexpensively. Next up will be applications that need to be distributed globally to increase availability.

    At the same time, a lot of VMware shops will be moving application development into the cloud. But just because an application is developed in the cloud doesn’t mean it will stay there. Many IT organizations have already discovered that when it comes to long-running applications, the total cost of deploying them on-premises is less than deploying them on a public cloud. The DevOps tasks ahead, of course, will start with figuring out which VMware-based applications make the best candidates from a financial and availability perspective to be deployed on AWS.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Groundbreaking Technology for DevOps Omniscience; JFrog Announces Immediate Availability of JFrog Xray

    SANTA CLARA, CA–(Marketwired – Jul 5, 2016) – JFrog, the worldwide leader in infrastructure for software management and distribution, today announced the immediate availability of JFrog Xray, its pioneering product for accelerating software delivery by giving organizations unprecedented insight into their software packages and containers.

    As the industry’s first universal artifact analysis product, JFrog Xray works with all software package formats and a multitude of databases as it deeply and recursively scans every type of binary component ever used in a software project and points out changes or issues impacting the production environment.

    “The early response to JFrog Xray has been phenomenal,” said Shlomi Ben Haim, founder and CEO of JFrog. “We’re excited that more and more organizations will now be able to benefit from this pioneering technology for gaining radical transparency into the huge volume and variety of binary components used in development. The combination of validating with security databases, along with acquiring metadata from JFrog Artifactory makes JFrog Xray the only tool in the world that not only scans the container or software package, but also provides a full dependency graph and impact analysis to the user. Our goal is to address the real DevOps pain and not just to send another scanner to the market!”

    As organizations increasingly transform from isolated teams and role-specific tools to common delivery pipelines shared by global teams and driven by seamlessly interoperating tools, they need to understand all the binary artifacts they produce, across all product lines and geographies, and taking into account changes to global application deployment and distribution over time.

    JFrog Xray addresses this need by providing deep recursive scanning to repeatedly peel back the layers of software components and their accompanying metadata to uncover security vulnerabilities or other issues down to the most fundamental binary component no matter what binary packaging format the organization uses. This deep scanning of the dependency graph provides organizations the ability to perform impact analysis on changes to their package structure.

    JFrog Xray is a fully automated platform with a powerful REST API, enabling integration with an organization’s CI/CD pipeline as well as with all current and any future types of component-scanning technology.

    It integrates with a universal range of databases and security platforms so that critical necessities such as security vulnerability analysis, license compliance and component version analysis and assurance become possible not only at build time but across all of the enterprise’s binary digital assets.

    JFrog Xray is available now at https://www.jfrog.com/xray/free-trial with a special webinar on JFrog Xray on July 14 — http://bit.ly/23gL143. More information about JFrog Editions —https://www.jfrog.com/pricing

    Resources

    About JFrog
    More than 2,500 paying customers, 60,000 installations and millions of developers globally rely on JFrog’s world-class infrastructure for software management and distribution. Customers include some of the world’s top brands, such as Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, MasterCard, Netflix, Tesla, Barclays, Cisco, Oracle, Adobe and VMware. JFrog Artifactory, the Universal Artifact Repository, JFrog Bintray, the Universal Distribution Platform, JFrog Mission Control, for Universal Repository Management, and JFrog Xray, Universal Component Analyser, are used by millions of developers and DevOps engineers around the world and available as open-source, on-premise and SaaS cloud solutions. The company is privately held and operated from California, France and Israel. More information can be found at www.jfrog.com.

    CONTACT INFORMATION

    • Media Contact
      Kelly Ferguson
      Kulesa Faul for JFrog
      (862) 223-9346
      Email Contact

  • JFrog Introduces Xray – Makes DevOps Omniscient

     

    JFrog Xray provides organizations a new standard of Radical Transparency and Deep Impact Analysis

    NAPA, Calif. – May 23, 2016 – JFrog today introduced its 4th and newest product, JFrog Xray, which gives organizations unprecedented visibility into the contents of software components. The announcement – made at swampUP, JFrog’s annual user conference – represents a major advancement in improving development, DevOps and InfoSec teams’ effectiveness and accelerating the continuous delivery pipeline.

    JFrog Xray is the first universal impact analysis product, giving organizations an unparalleled level of understanding about all of their container images, software packages and binary artifacts, even with the huge volume and variety of components that development teams share in the software build and distribution process.

    JFrog Xray is the only product on the market that provides radical transparency into every component an organization has ever used. It includes:

     

    • Impact analysis that indicates how production and CI environments are impacted
    • A full dependencies graph on which users can easily zoom in to find vulnerability or compliance issues
    • An open API that enables integration with all current and future types of component-scanning technology to allow custom scanning capabilities for performance, quality, popularity or any other criteria required
    • A universal solution that integrates with vulnerability and license compliance databases such as VersionEye, BlackDuck and WhiteSource
    • A powerful integration with user’s registry and repository to allow full sync through all the CI/CD flow.

    Through tight integration with JFrog Artifactory and access to the exhaustive metadata that Artifactory indexes, JFrog Xray is in a unique position to analyze the relationships between binary artifacts across an entire organization and analyze the impact that one component has on any other. In addition to security vulnerabilities, JFrog Xray can also analyze the potential impact of performance issues or architectural changes.

     

    “JFrog Xray responds to a profound pain of our users and the entire software development community for an infinitely expandable way to know everything about every component they’ve ever used in a software project – from build to production to distribution,” said Shlomi Ben Haim, CEO of JFrog. “While container technology revolutionized the market and the way people distribute software packages, it is still a ‘black hole’ that always contains other packages and dependencies. The Ops world has a real need to have full visibility into these containers plus an automated way to point out changes that will impact their production environment. With JFrog Xray, you can not only scan your container images but also to track all dependencies in order to avoid vulnerabilities and optimise your CI/CD flow.”

     

    JFrog Xray is a fully automated platform with a powerful REST API allowing integration and automation with an organization’s continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline, and enabling other inspection and security tools to fit into the full build-to-production automated flow.

    JFrog Xray includes the VersionEye technology and database. VersionEye, a startup company based in Mannheim, Germany, improves developer productivity through a system that tracks open-source libraries and alerts developers in real time to key information such as security vulnerabilities, license violations and outdated dependencies.

    “VersionEye technology monitors over a million open source projects on a daily basis,” said Robert Reiz, CEO and co-founder of VersionEye. “Integrating the VersionEye technology with the JFrog platform creates an unparalleled capability for deep understanding of the quality and provenance of the software components organizations depend on. JFrog has leveraged its Universal approach, supporting all type of components, into a leadership position with its artifact repository and addresses a real community pain with JFrog Xray. We are excited to be part of the solution.”

    The technology solves a critical problem for companies as they increasingly use container technology and make open source a mainstay of their development strategies. With so many open source components available, it has become extremely difficult, if not impossible, for application builders to know pertinent information about each one and avert security issues, such as the Heartbleed bug in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library that put user passwords at many popular websites at risk.

    JFrog Xray will be demonstrated at swampUP, taking place May 23-24 in Napa, Calif. The product will be generally available on June 30, 2016.

    Resources

    About JFrog

    More than 2,000 paying customers, 60,000 installations and millions of developers and DevOps engineers globally rely on JFrog’s world-class infrastructure for software management and distribution. Customers include some of the world’s top brands, such as Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, MasterCard, Netflix, Tesla, Barclays, Cisco, Oracle, Adobe, Intel and VMware. JFrog tools – comprising open-source, on-premise and SaaS cloud solutions – are revolutionizing the way companies and individuals develop, release and distribute software. JFrog Artifactory, the Universal Artifact Repository, and JFrog Bintray, the Universal Distribution Hub platform, are used by millions of developers and DevOps engineers around the world. The company is privately held and operated from California, France and Israel. More information can be found at www.jfrog.com.

    ###

    Media Contact

    Danielle Salvato-Earl

    Kulesa Faul for JFrog

    (650) 922-7287

    danielle@kulesafaul.com

     

  • JFrog Announces swampUP 2016 Agenda and Keynote Speakers

    SANTA CLARA, CA — (Marketwired) — 03/29/16 — JFrog today announced the agenda for its second annual swampUP user conference, featuring keynote speakers Sully Sullenberger, former airline captain and aviation safety expert, and Adrian Cockcroft, DevOps visionary at Battery Ventures. Taking place May 23-24 in Napa, Calif., the two-day event will also include sessions led by several DevOps industry experts and Fortune 500 customers of JFrog.

    swampUP 2016 will gather leading developers and DevOps engineers from around the world to exchange knowledge, new ideas and best practices around continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and provide a unique opportunity for attendees to meet and build relationships with fellow users and community leaders, with a glass of Napa Valley wine in hand.

    Captain Sullenberger will share his experience managing a real disaster, when he successfully executed an emergency water landing of a commercial flight in the Hudson River, at the swampUP community gala on the evening of May 23. With the data center as their cockpit, developers and DevOps pros will learn how to avoid and recover from their own disasters. Watch the trailer: “Will You be Ready When Your Server Crashes?”

    swampUP 2016 sessions include:

    • “Will You Be Ready When Your Server Crashes?” – Capt. Sully Sullenberger
    • “The Future of DevOps” – Adrian Cockcroft, Battery Ventures
    • “Managing Huge Files on the Right Storage with Git LFS” – Tim Pettersen, Atlassian
    • “Best Practices in Docker Continuous Delivery” – Carl Quinn, Riot Games
    • “Astrid: Artifactory-Sourced Dependency Insight at Netflix” – Jon Schneider and Nadav Cohen, Netflix
    • “Automated Distribution of Open Source and Private Components with JFrog Bintray” – Allen Reese and Jack Weaver, Yahoo!
    • “Docker at Scale” – Viraj Purang, Oracle and Jagan Subramanian, JFrog
    • “Immutable Infrastructure with Docker and Artifactory at Cars.com” – Keith Kreissl, Mac Heller-Ogden, Zlatko Sisic and Deep Mistry, Cars.com
    • “DevOps Journey at IBM Research” – Christian Vecchiola, IBM
    • “GitHub + Artifactory – A Match Made in Heaven (Or at Least in the Cloud)” – Cynthia Rich, GitHub and Baruch Sadogursky, JFrog
    • “How Bintray Saved My Marriage: Scaling WebJars with Bintray” – James Ward, Salesforce.com
    • “Bringing Android Content to the Big Screen with Google Cast” – Kevin Nilson, Google
    • “Bot-driven Development with Artifactory” – Jim Clark, Atomist
    • “Are Open Source Vulnerabilities Hiding Out in Your Repository?” – Bill Ledingham, Black Duck
    • “JFrog Artifactory as the Automated Backbone for a Global CD Tool Chain” – Craig Vosburgh, CA Technologies
    • “Building the System of Systems – Creating a Universal CI/CD Pipeline for Legacy Applications” – Mark Maxey, Raytheon
    • “Make Artifactory Dance: Automate Data Center Management Using Artifactory’s REST API and Groovy Plugins” – Bryan Belanger, Autostructure
    • “Continuous Delivery for the Cloud Native Java Developer” – Josh Long, Pivotal and Baruch Sadogursky, JFrog
    • “Leveraging JFrog Artifactory to Empower Developing Ideas in a Restricted Environment” – Alex Coto, University of Havana
    • “Does Size Matter? CI/CD in a Large Scale Infrastructure” – Loreli Cadapan and Rohit Kumar, Oracle
    • “Continuous Deployment into the Unknown with Artifactory, Bintray, Docker and Mesosphere” – Gilad Garon and Kiril Nesenko, VMware
    • “Writing Performance User Plugins for an HA Environment” – Daryl Spartz, Yahoo!
    • “Pragmatic Scalability: Under the Hood of Artifactory HA” – Viktor Gamov, Hazelcast

    To learn more about what swampUP 2016 will offer and what’s new to this year’s event, watch this video: https://youtu.be/57Zy7tu58sA.

    For additional information and to register for the event, visit:https://swampup.jfrog.com.

    Resources

    About JFrog
    More than 1,500 paying customers, 50,000 installations and millions of developers globally rely on JFrog’s world-class infrastructure for software management and distribution. Customers include some of the world’s top brands, such as Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, MasterCard, Netflix, Tesla, Barclays, Cisco, Oracle, Adobe and VMware. JFrog tools, comprising open-source, on-premise and SaaS cloud solutions, are revolutionizing the way companies and individuals develop, release and distribute software. JFrog Artifactory, the Universal Artifact Repository, and JFrog Bintray, the Universal Distribution Hub, are used by millions of developers and DevOps engineers around the world. The company is privately held and operated from California, France and Israel. More information can be found atwww.jfrog.com.

    Embedded Video Available

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    Media Contact
    Danielle Salvato-Earl
    Kulesa Faul for JFrog
    (650) 922-7287
    Email Contact

  • JFrog, Puppet, Datical & Sendachi – Money Continues to Pour Into DevOps

    JFrog, Puppet, Datical & Sendachi – Money Continues to Pour Into DevOps

    The stock markets may be bearish, the price of oil is down the drain, but money continues to pour into the DevOps tools and solutions market. Just in the last few days 4 companies have announced significant new funding. Whether this is a last gasp before the doors slam shut, the tech industry thumbing their nose at the rest of the business world or proof that the recent market downtrend is a red herring I don’t know. But as someone who has lived through more than a few bubble bursts in the tech world it bears watching.

    For now though, the good times continue to roll! Lets review the new funding news:

    jfrogJFrog raises an astounding $50m! That amount of money is nothing to sneeze at! I spoke with Shlomi Ben Haim, CEO at JFrog. They have over 120 people working there in offices in Israel, HQ in Santa Clara and France. Their JFrog Artifactory and JFrog Bintray are hosting software for organizations the world over, big and small.  Ben Haim and his team, as well as his blue chip investors believe the time is now as DevOps goes mainstream. They want to make sure they have the money to capitalize on the opportunity. Congrats to the JFrog team and we are excited to see what this money translates to for them.

     

    puppet-labs-logo Puppet Labs raises $22m in debt financing. While Puppet continues its phenomenal growth it took the opportunity to grab $22m in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank. I spoke to Puppet CEO Luke Kanies about the raise and he told me that he is not even sure the company will use this money, as they still have a sizable portion of their last raise in the bank and are getting close to profitability.  But at today’s low interest rates who can blame him for taking advantage of available cash? There was a time when debt financing was frowned upon. Why take on debt when you could give some equity for cash. But in today’s low interest rate/ high valuations world, why give valuable equity when you can get money for near free?  In addition to the money, Puppet is also expanding their offices by about 37,000 square feet and have appointed financial veteran, Lou Lavigne to their board. This continues their preparation towards and IPO down the road. Of course with the market where it is, they may be better off staying private.

    logo-datical-bDatical raises $8m Series B round. Databases as part of the DevOps movement are going to have their day and Datical wants to be the company to make it happen. To do that they have raised a Series B led by S3 Ventures. They money will be used to continue development of their agile Database automation tools, as well as sales and marketing. I had a chance to speak with Ben Geller and Robert Reeves of Datical. One of the things they want to use the funds for is to expand beyond the North American market. That is a wise move given the economic environment and the reality of a global marketplace. There was a time when Internet companies could concentrate on the US and thrive, but the demographics just don’t support it anymore.

    Sendachi_Logo_gray.232337Finally, today marks the debut of Sendachi. Sendachi is a consulting firm dedicated to helping companies with their DevOps transformation. It was (initially anyway) formed by the merger of Seattle-based Clutch and London based Contino. Along with $30m dollars from Columbia Capital. The money will be used to expand the firms marketing and business teams. Some portion of it though will also probably be used to fund further acquisition. I had a chance to speak with former Clutch and now Sendachi CEO,Steven Anderson and former Contino founder and my friend Ben Wooten. They were both very excited by the potential of this Atlantic spanning venture. Anderson said that the $30m is just the start and if necessary more capital could be available for strategic purposes. My feeling is that we may be seeing the birth of a roll up in DevOps consulting practices in Sendachi.

    In other M&A news on this topic, Docker announced it has acquired Unikernel Systems as well.

    Congratulations to all of the companies raising capital and buying and selling. Anyone who has had to raise money or have bought and sold a company knows that it is not an easy thing to accomplish.  Who will be the next DevOps company raising money? We probably won’t have to wait long to find out.

  • A Slice of Groovy’s Hip Use of JFrog Artifactory & Bintray, and of Gradle and TeamCity

    A Slice of Groovy’s Hip Use of JFrog Artifactory & Bintray, and of Gradle and TeamCity

    Grrroooooovy, Baby!

    Groovy supporters describe the Groovy programming language as dynamic and statically typed, supporting functional programming and OOP as a superset that includes the Java programming language. “It’s a kind of Java on steroids if you will!” says Guillaume Laforge, an Apache Groovy project PPMC member. A few examples of common applications of Groovy will help to illustrate its position in the programming landscape.

    Developers use Groovy in the build and test phases of a variety of projects even though they did not code their applications in Groovy. Coders find Groovy an inviting language for writing and maintaining tests due to its reader-friendly concision. “Developers use Groovy with the Spock Framework for unit testing and behavior-driven development and with Geb for Web integration testing,” says Laforge.

    Programmers use Groovy scripts for application extensibility for integration, configuration, customizations, and plug-ins. “The Jenkins Build Flow plug-in is a prime example as it enables users to orchestrate jobs by using the Groovy language to extract those jobs’ flow logic,” says Laforge. Other uses for Groovy include domain-specific languages, administration, automation, and Web, desktop, and mobile application development.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud explores elements of Groovy’s trip from manual to automated development.

    Manual Processes, Not So Groovy

    When the developers of the Groovy language released software from individual developer machines and using other manual processes, this created several issues. If a developer neglected to give birth to a dedicated release branch, this could equate to non-committed files and local changes transferring directly into the release prior to joining the mainline source tree, skirting prudent source control requirements.

    “Or we could simply forget to set tags for releases or we could commit errant version number data,” says Laforge; “although the release’s version is x.y.z., the version in the manifest would be x.y.w.”

    In some cases with individual developer machines, new developers would experience discrepancies. For example, a new developer performing a project build could see dependency-related challenges such as when one project depends on another that has corrupted “pom” (Project Object Model) files. “Local repositories would fill up with odd dependencies,” says Laforge. There were other issues, as well.

    Groovy Fully Automates Its Release Process

    One of the progressions that Groovy made toward automated bliss was in the realm of version control. Groovy eventually moved from CVS to Subversion to Git and from Codehause to Github as its repository. “More recently, we moved the sources to Apache’s Git, as Groovy entered the Apache Software Foundation incubation process,” says Laforge.

    Today, Groovy developers send snapshots to the JFrog open source Maven repository, Artifactory, to test their bug fixes and features. According to Laforge, Groovy applies the JetBrains TeamCity CI server to build artifacts and distributions; the Artifactory plug-in for TeamCity enables Groovy to stage releases using Artifactory. Artifactory and Bintray integration enables Groovy to push everything to Bintray. Dependency management occurs on Bintray’s JCenter Maven repository. Synchronization with Maven Central supports developers who are retrieving dependencies.

    The Gradle build automation tool supports a mature build setup for Groovy, allowing the language developer to bootstrap its own compiler, enabling it to build Groovy code. “This is part of our deliverable, i.e., Groovy basically compiling itself,” says Laforge; “this would be much more difficult using other build solutions.”

    Drilling down, there are more benefits to having Gradle and TeamCity working in tandem. For one, it affords Groovy the opportunity to test different flavors and functionalities of Groovy on different platforms and environments. “We can do this using different JDK versions from 6 up to the as yet unreleased ver. 9, testing against our own snapshots and using different flags for testing and building Groovy with or without the invoke dynamic support from JDK 7 onward, with different branches,” says Laforge.

    Reinstituting Manual Processes for Apache

    On entering the Apache Software Foundation, Groovy had to re-introduce manual steps in order meet Apache guidelines that state that Apache committers must build projects themselves and that they need to sign their deliverables with their own keys. “We are still using Gradle, JetBrains Team City, and JFrog Artifactory and Bintray, but not in as much an automated fashion as before,” says Laforge.