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  • 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: AI Log Analysis with Gabby Menachem, CEO, Loom Systems

    DevOps Chat: AI Log Analysis with Gabby Menachem, CEO, Loom Systems

    Log analysis has become a big data issue. As we collect and want to analyze more and more information, the amount of data to analyze seems to grow by leaps and bounds. One answer to this issue is AI Log Analysis (apply artificial intelligence). While I will spare you the obligatory “machine learning” references, there are companies that are bringing AI to this issue.

    One such company is a startup from Israel, Loom Systems. devopsy.kinsta.cloud sat down with Loom Systems CEO Gabby Menachem in this episode of DevOps Chat. As usual, the streaming audio of our conversation is below, with the written transcript of our conversation immediately below that. Enjoy!

    Alan Shimel: Hello, everyone. It’s Alan Shimel, editor in chief, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, for another DevOps Chat. On this episode of DevOps Chat, we’re joined by Gabby Menachem, who’s CEO of Loom Systems and comes to us today from Israel. Hello, Gabby, how are you?

    Gabby Menachem:  I’m great. Hi, Alan. Thanks for having me.

    Shimel: Thank you for being our guest today, Gabby. Gabby, I guess we should start with – I’m gonna imagine that folks in our audience are not familiar with Loom Systems, so would you mind giving us just kind of a quick background on Loom Systems?

    Menachem:  Sure. Loom Systems is a platform—a solution, actually, to predict and prevent problems in your digital business. We actually are able to analyze logs and semi-structured machine data for immediate visibility into the company’s digital environment, any environment going from legacy systems to the latest application, your homegrown application that you just wrote. And, by doing that, we can significantly reduce the cost and complexity of working with operational analytics on IT. And, using our tribal knowledge bank, which is called “TriKB,” we’re actually able to find issues proactively using log analysis and bring them to IT’s attention and help them resolve them in minutes, instead of hours or days.

    Shimel: Got it. So, Gabby, just to be clear, is Loom actually the log gatherer—in other words, gathering the logs—or is it just analyze logs that are provided from another solution?

    Menachem:  So that’s a great question and, for the most—in most environments, we’re not focused on gathering the logs, so we come to places, in most cases, where they already collect logs, although our solution can handle the collection of logs as well. What we focus on is the actual analysis, so we find that businesses today have a problem utilizing their personnel that they already have, in order to find a root cause and do root cause analysis of issues in the logs. And, as we all know, when you have a problem and with today’s digital transformation, you have to go into the logs in order to find issues that affect your customers. And so, by using Loom Systems, you’re able to get help with that root cause analysis and you get actionable recommendation on how to solve these issues in minutes. And that’s how you can actually use a solution that helps you with the analysis phase and not with the ingestion or things like that.

    We also provide a way to do collection and all the other features of a log management tool, but it’s not out focus and we’re, to be honest, in most cases, we’re happy to find that businesses have already put effort into looking at logs in a centralized manner. That kinda gives us the signal that they’re already operational and they’re looking at logs as a way to solve issues and find the ROI in that case.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, Gabby, give us an idea what kind of log gathering tools does Loom System integrate with. Is it Splunk and that type of thing?

    Menachem:  So we work, basically, with every tool in the market. I’m not aware of a customer that we went to that we weren’t able to connect in less than 90 minutes, so that’s our claim for fame and you can test us, if you want.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    Menachem:  And it takes us—the main thing with our platform is that, from whatever source that you would stream logs from—it could be Splunk, as you said; it can be open-source tools like Logstash or proprietary tools that are Syslog, for example—and, from there to streaming information into Loom, what would happen is that Loom would parse the logs automatically and find anomalies and trends and can actually alert you on things before it affects your business. So we’re appealing more to the business layer, where we want to connect what IT is doing to what the business is looking for, in terms of understanding users’ behavior, anomalies that affect the customer experience, and, basically, our ROI, in most cases, is measured on preventing churn from customers that are actually looking for a better customer experience with all these businesses’ ongoing and digital transformation. Does that make sense?

    Shimel: Yeah, it makes total sense. So, Gabby, one of the probably most overused terms we’re hearing in the market today, but I don’t see it mentioned in the Loom Systems, is this idea of machine learning, if you will. And, you know, machine learning kinda goes hand in hand with AI and stuff like that. Is that kinda what Loom is doing then, in performing this analysis? Or something different?

    Menachem:  Yes. So the way that we actually are able to do all of that is based on machine learning and AI. We don’t want to use the hype of the words as much as we want businesses to understand that this is actually the future of being able to analyze data, so one of the key hurdles that we see or the barriers that customers experience is that, when you want to analyze information, first of all, you need to get a data scientist, which they’re hard to find these days, and you need to have a good methodology of how to analyze your data.

    And one of the key issues here is that Loom is able, through AI and through the heuristics that we’ve put in, to actually do this for you. So we’re trying to abstract away all the complexities of using machine learning and working with features that most data scientists do today, and, that way, we can actually use your, well, highly skilled personnel, but they are not now proficient with using these machine learning systems. So this is the way for you to use super advanced analytics and AI without having to go through extensive training or something like that. The machine would just act as if it’s a human and as if you’ve got a new IT person in your environment that can actually go through the logs all day, without getting tired, and just alert you, call you, and say, “Alan, come look at this. This looks interesting. And, by the way, when I saw this last, we had a problem with our database and we were able to fix it by applying this patch from Oracle,” for example.

    Shimel: Got it.

    Menachem:  Does that answer your question?

    Shimel: Yes, it does. So, Gabby, give us an idea of—and we realize Loom is a startup, but what is the target? Who is the target customer here?

    Menachem:  So we’re marketing to medium-sized businesses through enterprises. Mostly doing insight sales these days, less of an enterprise sale, per se, but what we’re doing is we’re going to these organizations and we’re talking to anyone from the CIO down through directors and IT leaders and DevOps, in order to explain to them that one of the biggest, most sought after solutions that they were always thinking about, which is “How do I actually find things – surface things that are of interest from my logs without any prior configuration?” So you don’t wanna do the big project of parsing your logs and explaining to a system what is important, what is not. You don’t wanna do all of this that is in the market today, which is based on supervised learning, where you have to give a lot of feedback and explain to the system how things should work. You just want the system to act as if it’s a human and understand by itself what is meaningful and what is not.

    And, with that approach of unsupervised learning with a few feedback loops that we employ, what you can actually get is a very sophisticated tool with a very simple approach to operating it, which I think is what IT operations is looking for all the time. We want the simplicity and—actually, we want the complexity of our environments to not transcend to the complexity of the tools that we use, so simplicity in the tools gives us better way to manage these problems. We don’t wan to suffer from alert fatigue and we don’t want to interact with systems that take years to learn and to know how to operate, and that’s the way that we’re actually able to give better customer experience for our customers and solve issues faster.

    So, today, when we go into a business, it takes us about 90 minutes, as I said, to install and get running. And you see the value from your Loom installation in the same day. Do this either on-prem or in our SAS, in AWS or in Azure, so you have all the possibilities there, and we go to both big businesses, like banks and insurance companies through retail and e-commerce, and down to businesses with 200 people. But our main audience is the medium businesses all over and DevOps leaders that are looking for the next generation of proactive alerting.

    Shimel: Got it. So, Gabby, in a lot of ways, this type of intelligence—you know, I come from a security background and we’re seeing this more and more in security, providing actionable intelligence, analysis of—because, I mean, the good thing about big data is it’s big. We have a lot of data; we’re seeing a lot of things. But trying to make heads or tails of it and boil it down to actionable intelligence is key; otherwise, we just drown in data. How did you guys kinda come up with the idea to do this?

    Menachem:  So, first of all, the big thing here is what you described—the fact that we were—a lot of the team was working in intelligence, in fact, before that, and we’ve seen a lot of this use cases where you’ve had to look at a lot of information and be able to sift through it and find interesting things, in order to bring them in front of a human that can make the business decision.

    So there’s a layering system, where you look at data as the lowest layer and on top of it there’s the what we call “information layer,” which is where all the tools today are. So it’s a way to have a mapping between data and visualization, so let’s take the number of errors that you see in your logs, for example—that could become a graph. And, on top of this graph, what people are doing today is they’re looking at it and figuring out if there’s some anomaly or a trend there that they should be looking at, and then they go back to the data and make sense to out of it. This is the third layer, which is called the “intelligence layer,” and this is where our tool operates. On top of this, there’s one more layer which is called “wisdom,” and that’s where you connect the intelligence layer, which tells you what is going on with a business decision that you have to make, and then you can take action.

    So an example would be—and sometimes we get this question of, “Why don’t you connect this to automation tool to actually resolve issues automatically?” And what we say is that resolving issues is a business decision. It’s not just about, you know, if it’s Black Friday and our system is finding that there are one percent of your users that are experiencing a problem, you don’t want the server to restart because you’re gonna lose a lot of business, so the business decision has to remain in the hands of DevOps leaders.

    And, coming back to why we started this business and how we came up with the idea, it’s basically—I think what happened in intelligence is actually happening in the commercial market, so big data is a new thing in our world, but it’s not a new thing in intelligence. It’s been there for 50 years. And, as the intelligence community grew and came to the conclusion that something had to be brought into a visualization tool, they built this information layer, and then the next phase was to actually build “smart systems,” as people call it today, to analyze information for you and come up with things that people just can’t handle, in terms of capacity. So the cognitive ability that we built into the solution perfectly aligns with what happened in the intelligence community, and now we’re bringing it to the commercial market, for the use of all these businesses doing digital transformation.

    Shimel: Makes sense. Makes sense. So, Gabby, we’re coming on the end of our time—as I mentioned to you, it goes fast. Where can people find out more about Loom Systems?

    Menachem:  So through our website, loomsystems.com, is the best way to get information. You can sign up there or you can even talk to us with a chat online. We provide free trials, so it’s very easy to start streaming information to our SAS business, and we can converse with you and start understanding your use case. We’re very fast to operate and you’d see value in the same day. I invite everyone to come talk to us and you can also meet us at a lot of the industry events. We’re gonna be in OpenStack next week and hope to see you there and talk to you.

    Shimel: Got it. Gabby, just so the audience knows, what is a typical engagement price-wise or how is it priced?

    Menachem:  So it’s based—today, it’s based on the number of instances sending information into Loom, so one of the differentiators, in the way we price this, is it’s not data volume-based, so you can actually send us as much information as you want, unlimited data, and we just count by the number of instances sending information into Loom. And the regular prices, they start at about, I’d say, $20,000.00 for the smallest amount, and most installations are in the $50,000.00 to $100,000.00 on annual deal.

    Shimel: Got it. Excellent. Well, Gabby, thanks for sharing this information with us today and thanks for being our guest on this episode of DevOps Chat. Continued success with Loom Systems and we’d like to hear more maybe, going in the future—if my mail program would stop making noise, we’d be okay. I apologize. Gabby, we’ll check back in on Loom Systems perhaps in a few months and see what kind of—what’s new, but until then, keep doing what you’re doing. This is exciting, kinda representing the future of where we are with analysis and using computers, so congratulations and continued success to you and Loom Systems. This is Alan –

    Menachem:  Thank you very much, Alan.

    Shimel: Thank you, Gabby. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps Chat and devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Thanks for listening, everyone. We’ll see you soon on another DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Shippable Launches Industrialized Continuous Deployment Platform

    SEATTLE, WA (Aug 25, 2016) Shippable has announced the next generation of its continuous deployment platform. The enhanced platform adds key features like release management, multi-cloud capabilities, a declarative pipeline language and a unified view across all application pipelines. These features help software-powered organizations further streamline the process of shipping software and accelerating innovation.

    Today, most organizations find it challenging to innovate fast enough to satisfy consumers. DevOps is a set of principles that tries to solve this problem. However, the workflow required to get applications from source code to running in production is complicated and riddled with fragmented technology solutions. The only way to achieve rapid, iterative innovation is to cobble these fragments together in one continuous pipeline. Unfortunately, these custom, homegrown pipelines are rigid, inflexible and hard to maintain. The do-it-yourself approach is a distraction and takes valuable cycles away from product engineering.

    Shippable’s integrated platform is built from the ground up to defragment and streamline the process of shipping applications, so that software-powered organizations can accelerate innovation.

    Figure: Continuous deployment maturity model

    The heterogeneous platform integrates with all popular tools and cloud infrastructures, as well as cutting-edge technologies like Docker, AWS Elastic Container Service, Google Kubernetes, Microsoft Azure Container Service, Joyent Triton and Apache Mesos DC/OS. As a result, organizations can evolve fearlessly and adopt modern technology while continuing to leverage their existing investments. In addition, since Shippable supports traditional and cloud-native applications, organizations can mature from L1 to L4 across their entire application portfolio at their own pace.

    Some of the key features in the new platform include:

    Application release automation: Semantic versioning of applications is built-in with complete control over deployment of versions to dev vs. test vs. prod environments. Deployments can be automatic or with an approval gate.

    Declarative pipeline language: The entire process of shipping software is expressed in a declarative yml configuration. This alleviates the need for imperative scripts that are fragile, error prone and hard to maintain. This language abstracts non-standardized vendor APIs into a common, human-readable configuration, making complex workflows easy to create.

    Multi-cloud deployments: Leveraging declarative pipelines, the same application can be deployed into a multi-cloud or a hybrid topology with a few lines of yml configuration. This makes it very easy to implement disaster recovery across multiple clouds. Teams can also develop and test in the cloud while running their production environment on-premises without maintaining multiple deployment pipelines.

    Single pane of glass: The flow of shipping software from code to production can be visualized in an unified interactive view across one or many applications in the organization. This view is updated in real-time and errors or bottlenecks in the workflow can be quickly identified and rectified.

    “We’ve been using Shippable for over a year and it ‘just works,’ no matter how complex our test framework gets!” says Shamasis Bhattacharya, VP Engineering at Postman. “It has ensured that we never ever ship out a bad piece of code.”

    “We’ve used Shippable to ship Shippable the past couple of years. Initially, we added features mainly for ourselves. In the last year, as our customer base grew tremendously and as containers gained mainstream acceptance, our roadmap became customer driven and this has helped us make the platform generic. We run over three million deployment workflows a year for our customers and I think that by itself speaks for the battle readiness, resilience and scale of the platform,” says Avi Cavale, co-founder and CEO at Shippable. “With this new release, customers can leverage our declarative language, easily compose fungible pipelines, and start the process of rapid innovation in a matter of hours.”

    Availability and Pricing

    Shippable Hosted is a freemium SaaS offering. The free plan includes unlimited builds for open source projects and 150 builds a month for private projects. Paid plans get unlimited builds for all repositories and start at $25 for each parallel build.

    Shippable Server is currently in private beta.

    About Shippable

    Founded in 2013, Shippable’s mission is to help companies ship code faster and focus on innovation by removing all friction in the software development and delivery workflows. For more information visit www.shippable.com.

  • Shippable Strengthens Leadership Team with Software Industry Pioneers

    Google Kubernetes cofounder and technical lead Joe Beda becomes a strategic advisor, Microsoft and VMware veteran Charles Fitzgerald joins Shippable’s Board of Directors, and developer and open source marketing expert Matt Carter joins leadership team

    SEATTLE – February 3, 2016 – Shippable has added multiple senior software experts to its leadership team as it builds out its application delivery pipeline for developers. Joe Beda, cofounder of Google Kubernetes and Google Compute Engine, has become a strategic advisor; Charles Fitzgerald, a veteran of building developer platforms, has joined Shippable’s Board of Directors; and Matt Carter, a former Microsoft and Hortonworks marketing director, has been appointed Shippable’s Vice President of Marketing.

    Shippable is a continuous delivery pipeline that enables software development teams to accelerate release cycles by automating the process of building, testing and deploying applications. The pipeline integrates with modern software development tools including GitHub and Bitbucket, as well as on-premises repositories, and provides seamless deployment to private clouds as well as leading public clouds including Amazon and Google. Shippable supports all application architectures, from enterprise-grade multi-tier to containerized microservices. Customers choose Shippable so they can focus on product innovation, thus accelerating their journey to cloud-independent microservices.

    Shippable is used today by more than 8,000 organizations and over 50,000 developers at companies including Concur, Google, Cisco, Lithium and Pushspring. Started as a TechStars incubation project, the company is backed by Seattle-based investors Madrona Venture Group, Founders’ Co-op and Divergent Ventures.

    Beda has a wide variety of skills and experience. Most recently, he helped start the Kubernetes open source project at Google to manage clusters of compute containers. Before that, Beda founded Google Compute Engine and was the lead engineer for the project. Previously, Beda worked on the Google ads system to build tools to help advertisers pick the right keywords and bids, connect Google services to the public telephone network, and defining and launching Google Talk. He’s currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners.

    “I’m excited to be advising Shippable as they bring automation to container building, verification and deployment,” says Beda. “Automation is a critical component of realizing the promise of containers and the cloud native philosophy. It enables developers to work in smaller and more nimble teams while simultaneously reducing the operations burden. The result is a development process that moves faster and produces a higher quality product.”

    Fitzgerald brings considerable product positioning, market strategy, developer relations and startup experience to Shippable. He spent 18 years at Microsoft, in a wide variety of platform roles including General Manager of Platform Strategy for .NET from its inception. More recently, he helped launch Cloud Foundry at VMware and build a polyglot developer relations organization. He currently is an investor and advisor to early stage technology companies.

    “Shippable is driving the evolution of continuous integration and continuous deployment into a cohesive and end-to-end pipeline to speed to the delivery of applications,” says Fitzgerald. “I look forward to helping this great team bring its vision for the future of software delivery to fruition.”

    Carter joins Shippable from Hortonworks, where he was Senior Director of Developer Marketing and Platform Evangelism. In this role he created and implemented its developer marketing and community engagement strategy. Prior to Hortonworks, Carter worked in product management and marketing at Microsoft for 12 years, finally as Director of Developer Marketing, where he was responsible for creating integrated marketing strategies and global execution of marketing campaigns for software developers.

    “Charles is a highly regarded expert in the emerging tech and developer arenas, and has extensive experience helping early stage companies grow rapidly. Joe’s cloud computing background and experience launching Kubernetes make him an ideal advisor as we help companies deploy new container-based applications on cloud architecture. Matt offers a deep understanding of developers and the tools they need to bring new apps and services to market quickly. All three strengthen our leadership and operations teams, and will help us accelerate our business,” says Avi Cavale, cofounder and CEO at Shippable.

    About Shippable

    Founded in 2013, Shippable’s mission is to remove all friction in software engineering so that software flows from the developer’s keyboard all the way to the end user with no stops along the way. Using Docker, we bring you the power of full automation, with complete control and confidence, no matter how large or complex your software engineering world is. For more information visit www.shippable.com.