devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: rollout

  • CloudBees Acquires Rollout, Adding Feature Flag System to Manage Deployment Risk and Accelerate Software Feature Delivery

    DevOps Leader Adds Feature Flagging Capability, to Help Development Teams Release Software With More Flexibility, Less Risk

    SAN JOSE, Calif. – June 11, 2019 – CloudBees, Inc., the enterprise DevOps leader powering the continuous economy, today announced the acquisition of Rollout, a secure feature management company providing software specifically targeted for developers and product teams. The deal further strengthens CloudBees’ leadership in the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) market, giving customers the ability to deliver new features safely, securely and quickly into production.

    The benefit of continuous software delivery is clear for high-performing software developers and teams who want to separate code deployments from feature releases. Customer relationships are enhanced by safely testing features in production environments, gathering valuable feedback and releasing new and improved features continuously. An increased number of incremental feature releases enables fast and early learning. This helps speed up feature adoption and ultimately helps organizations avoid the “big-bang-or-bust” infrequent feature release syndrome. This type of continuous release feature drip is the hallmark of successful continuous software delivery.

    According to Forrester, “Getting ideas in front of users faster — ‘continuous discovery’ — is the new normal. Experimentation platforms let teams test out minimum viable products (MVPs) in real-world scenarios with precise control. Feature flags let AD&D teams develop code as they normally would, allowing them to version control, test and deploy the same as always. However, feature flags give those teams complete control of when to expose a particular feature to users, allowing administrators to turn it on and off at the flip of a switch.”1

    By bringing the Rollout team and their feature flag software into the CloudBees family, CloudBees is taking a big step in the direction of enabling developers and teams to ship changes with freedom. The Rollout solution allows developers to continuously deliver changes, by enabling them to control both the roll out and roll back of features instantly on any platform, including mobile, regardless of deployment restrictions.

    “Our goal is to help organizations deliver great, feature-rich software efficiently while minimizing risks associated with the deployment process,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder of CloudBees. “The acquisition of Rollout gives CloudBees customers the flexibility to decouple features from software versions. Using Rollout on their trusted enterprise platform allows developers to test and merge changes with more confidence than ever before.”

    “We’re thrilled to be part of the CloudBees team,” said Erez Rusovsky, CEO and co-founder of Rollout, who will take on the role of product director for the Rollout offering. “CloudBees has set the standard for excellence in CI and CD. Rollout joining forces with CloudBees is genuinely the case where 1+1=3. Feature flags and CI/CD combined help companies truly become continuous and increase the pace of innovation.”

    1Forrester Research, AD&D Pros: Stop Guessing And Start Experimenting, Christopher Condo and Bill Seguin, January 15, 2019

    Additional Resources

    About CloudBees
    CloudBees is powering the continuous economy by offering the world’s first end-to-end continuous software delivery management system (SDM). For millions of developers and product teams driving innovation for businesses large or small, SDM builds on continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to enable all functions and teams within and around the software delivery organization to best work together to amplify value creation.

    CloudBees is the CI, CD and application release orchestration (ARO) powerhouse, built on the commercial success of its products as well as its open source leadership. CloudBees is the largest contributor to Jenkins and Jenkins X, as well as a founding member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). From startups with full-stack developers practicing NoOps to large Fortune 100 companies, CloudBees enables all software-driven organizations to intelligently deploy the right capabilities at the right time.

    Over 3,500 of the world’s best known brands and over 50% of the Fortune 500, invest in CloudBees because of its ability to work across any cloud, in any development environment and to balance corporate governance and control with developer flexibility and freedom. CloudBees is home to the world’s leading DevOps experts, helping thousands of companies harness the power of “continuous everything” and putting them on the fastest path from great idea, to great software, to great business value.

    Backed by Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Verizon Ventures, Delta-v Capital, Golub Capital, Unusual Ventures and HSBC, CloudBees was founded in 2010 by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey and an elite team of continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps professionals. Follow CloudBees on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

  • CloudBees Acquires Rollout for Feature Flagging

    CloudBees Acquires Rollout for Feature Flagging

    CloudBees today announced it would extend the reach of the Jenkins continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform by acquiring Rollout, a provider of feature flag tool that gets employed to simplify testing of new modules within an application.

    Company CEO Sacha Labourey said the acquisition of Rollout would result in a feature flag capability that is more seamlessly integrated with the gates that make up a CI/CD pipeline process. The goal is to make it easier for DevOps teams to apply A/B testing of new application features against a subset of users before deciding to update an entire application environment, he said.

    Feature flagging, also known as feature toggling, enables DevOps teams to hide features from certain users at runtime. In effect, this creates multiple branches from the same source code that DevOps teams need to manage. Rather than having to employ a separate tool based on an entirely different user interface, CloudBees is moving to make feature flagging a core capability of its extended toolchain.

    In theory, feature flagging should be more widely employed than it is today. Many organizations, however, have found it challenging to incorporate separate feature flagging tools within their DevOps processes. CloudBees is now using some of the money it has raised of late to address that issue.

    Feature flagging today is largely confined to testing. However, there may come a day when more organizations will employ feature flagging to make different classes of user experience available to different end users. That approach, in theory, would make it possible to charge different fees for disparate application experiences using the same core application.

    In the meantime, the goal is to garner more feedback concerning new capabilities that might be added to an application before the features are made generally available. Developers often spend months developing new features only to discover end users are not employing those capabilities because of some trivial glitch that could have been discovered easily using A/B testing.

    There currently is no shortage of options when it comes to tools for implementing feature flagging. Labourey said CloudBees elected to acquire Rollout because the team behind it was deemed to have the best cultural fit with CloudBees. It’s too early to say whether other providers of feature flagging tools will be rolled up into other CI/CD platforms—providers of those platforms can either develop their own feature flagging toolsets or move to absorb a third-party provider either by acquiring them or forming a technology alliance. The depth of the toolchain being provided these days often has as much to do with what CI/CD platform ultimately gets adopted as the core integration and delivery capabilities.

    Regardless of the path chosen, it’s apparent that thanks to feature flagging, continuous testing processes will become more sophisticated. That may require some adjustments to existing best DevOps practices, but the days when development teams blindly experiment on end users in the hopes they are building the next killer feature mercifully are coming to an end.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Rollout Adds Configuration as Code Support and Integration with GitHub to Treat Feature Flags as Mission Critical Operations

    Plans to Open Source Flagship Platform to Drive Innovation and Provide Operational Benefits of Software Production Changes Without Sacrificing Management Processes

     San Francisco, October 24, 2018 – Rollout.io, a feature delivery and management company, today announced its feature management platform will leverage Configuration as Code (CaC) and a powerful integration with GitHub, so developers can treat feature flags as they treat any other mission-critical infrastructure.

    Additionally, Rollout plans to open source its feature management platform, providing greater flexibility and stronger ownership of feature changes in production. Both moves allow development organizations to gain the benefits of using feature flags – such as increased speed of development and deployment, and reduced risks of deploying new code – without sacrificing any of the known management processes that govern the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

    “Rollout’s CaC approach, the integration with GitHub, and the decision to open source its feature flag technology means that developers now enjoy the benefit of both worlds – faster development and deployment of new features without the risk of breaking things,” said Kyle Daigle, director of Ecosystem Engineering for GitHub.

    Feature flags modeled with CaC means that for the first time, software developers can design, implement, and deploy application features using the same processes used to manage code changes, like full change management, ability to rollback, track ownership of changes, and more, to reduce the inherent risks of breaking production. The ability to treat feature flags like configuration as code and use the same tools as any other software project allows dev teams to be more agile, and rapidly deploy features that add value to a business much faster than before.

    “Until now, control of feature flags has circumvented existing software development and deployment processes or known checks and balances for software development and production changes,” said Erez Rusovsky, co-founder and CEO of Rollout.io. “The decision to integrate our configuration as code with Git & GitHub and open source our platform means that product and development teams have consistent and reliable control of every feature in production, resulting in applications that are easier to develop and maintain.”

    Rollout’s feature management solution with CaC will initially leverage GitHub as an integration point with support for Atlassian, Gitlab and other hosting services coming soon.

    “We use feature flags to continuously deploy new features to production without risk so, it was important to find a solution that is engineering-friendly. One platform met those requirements, and it was Rollout,” explained Ron Shoshani, vice president of R&D at Testim.io. “Integration with GitHub allows our dev teams to work faster in collaboration on dev and deploy goals. Rollout’s plans for open source will ultimately provide us with more flexibility and ownership over the code that drives our business.”

    Using Rollout, developers, DevOps and product managers can speed the development and deployment of software, while reducing risk and improving customer satisfaction and experience. Rollout designed its management system with feature flags and controls for gradually releasing features in development and production with the ability to rollout back features when needed. This is possible by separating version release from feature deployments, and it provides companies with flexibility to deliver features to specific users at a granular level.

    Rollout supports multiple clients and backend platforms. It adds feature level support across an organization’s entire stack. The company also recently announced its integration with Atlassian’s Jira Software.

    Pricing for Rollout’s feature management is based on seats and MAU and starts at $75.00. To try Rollout, please visit www.rollout.io.

     Learn more:

    For more information on feature flags, check out Rollout’s eBook The Ultimate Feature Flag Guide or follow Rollout’s blog, or on Twitter @RolloutIO and LinkedIn.

    About Rollout.io

    Rollout.io is a feature delivery and management company that accelerates software development and release and minimizes the risk of deploying new code. It is the only unified platform for feature delivery, experimentation, and application-layer remote configuration. Built for engineers, developers and product managers, to rollout, rollback, test and adapt features at scale, in real time. Rollout gives teams full visibility and control of all application features to deliver the right feature to the right user at the right time. Founded in 2014, Rollout has offices in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, Israel. Learn more at www.rollout.io.

  • Automation: Achieving Faster Rollouts with Better Accuracy

    Automation: Achieving Faster Rollouts with Better Accuracy

    A changing landscape requires new processes

    At the recent Symposium/ITxpo, Gartner shared a list of technologies and trends that will be important for organizations to embrace and prepare for in 2017. These trends, which are listed in the report, “Top Strategic Predictions for 2017 and Beyond: Surviving the Storm Winds of Digital Disruption,” reinforce the breadth of technology that IT must support, roll out and engage with. This includes everything from the 100 million consumers who will shop using augmented reality to dealing with the roughly 21 billion endpoints expected to be in use in 2020.

    The report also demonstrates how fast technology changes directions. For example, Gartner predicts that in 2019, 20 percent of brands are expected to abandon their mobile apps. “Many brands are finding that the level of adoption, customer engagement and return on investment (ROI) delivered by their mobile applications are significantly less than the expectations that underpinned their app investment,” the report notes. However, this doesn’t mean less work. IT departments continuously have shift gears to support new processes, news apps and new technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the massive amount of data that it produces.

    The dynamic needs of today’s businesses are driving organizations to increasingly adopt new technologies and applications that oftentimes don’t play nice with the existing set of infrastructure and legacy systems in place. So, while it’s clear that the technology landscape is changing, what isn’t so obvious is how IT and business decision makers should be adapting to an industry that is in constant motion.

    In-Steps DevOps

    To keep up, IT must implement agile methodologies that can adapt quickly to market changes. The DevOps mentality is making its way into many organizations and involves the development team creating, building and evolving products to ensure the organization is up to date, while the operations team confirms everything is running smoothly prior to a launch going live. This level of checks and balances isn’t just a nice to have, it’s a necessity—one mistake and the entire system can be brought down. Fostering a greater level of collaboration between development and operations makes it possible to efficiently and effectively build, test and correct new features and new products.

    While the shift to a more collaborative environment between the Dev and Ops teams can take time, using modern IT automation solutions can make this transition easier. Such solutions automate many of the routine—and even not so routine—elements of the application release process within DevOps. Many of the actions necessary to move from code to production—not to mention maintenance, testing and cleanup tasks—can be taken off the backs of developers and operations, saving them time so they can focus on higher-level projects and reduce manual errors.

    Finding the Balance Between Speed and Accuracy

    In 2012, Facebook announced it was increasing the speed at which it released code to twice a day, every day. As Chuck Rossi, director of Release Engineering at Facebook said, his team follows the advice “ship early and ship often.” Facebook continues to follow this model, and while the company certainly didn’t invent it, the model has caught on and is spreading among companies developing virtually every type of technology. The catch? It’s an incredibly time-intensive process and not every company has the resources necessary for a dedicated release team. Plus, a true shift to DevOps doesn’t happen overnight, especially since there is a ramp-up time for folks to get on board. For example, Phil Dibowitz, systems engineer at Facebook, told TechTarget that it “led its Chef team through a three-year process to rethink configuration management to scale on par with the web-scale company’s data centers.”  This took three years, he said, “not because of the technological change, but because of the structural change.”

    A slow transition to a new technology or new way of operating is a common occurrence because historically the production systems are cordoned off from development groups. While the Ops team has to ensure the rollout will meet certain standards, the Dev team wants to speed the process to begin the final rollout process as soon as possible. A happy medium exists, but if it isn’t found, things can go very wrong. Unfortunately, 2015 gave us two major examples of what can go wrong if products can’t speak to each other and rollouts are completed too early: Remember the New York Stock Exchange and United debacles?

    Breaking Constraints Through Automation

    This is where modern workload automation comes into play. Automation and solid change management allows IT to flexibly add on new technologies with automated processes for building, testing, upgrading and configuring IT—all while reducing the slack time between various steps. For instance, a workload automation solution should be able to trigger a build, deploy the build to the test environment, run the test suite and, assuming testing meets acceptable criteria, promote the build to production. If something does go wrong, necessary remediation can occur, and through monitoring and alerting capabilities, the required parties can be notified proactively.

    Additionally, automation solutions with pre-built integrations make it easier for disparate applications to communicate, creating an end-to-end approach to workflow creation and maintenance. As a result, IT organizations can minimize the risk of business disruptions and achieve a more fluid technology delivery to the business.

    Although it’s not a silver bullet that will solve all DevOps transition issues, automation does reduce manual intervention, which leads to fewer delays and errors and improves speed at which tasks are completed. However, beyond the technological aspects, there must be a clear understanding by both sides (the Dev and Ops group) on what their counterparts need—and this requires a high level of trust and coordination.

    While the specifics around the DevOps methodology certainly will change, automation will remain a critical piece of the process. With IT automaton, DevOps teams are able to refocus on critical IT business and operational processes, thereby reducing delays, decreasing errors and improving the speed at which tasks are completed. Ultimately, automation makes it possible to increase the speed of product releases and enable companies to stay ahead in the age of unpredictable customer preferences and ever-changing technological developments.

    About the Author / Mehul Amin

    Mehul Amin, a 21-year veteran of Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. (ASCI), previously held roles as product engineer and technical support manager and played an integral part in building the company’s workload automation solution, ActiveBatch. In his current role as director of Engineering, Mehul drives high-profile initiatives and leads both the Product Engineering and Release Engineering teams. Mehul received a master’s in computer science from the Stevens Institute of Technology.