Effective collaboration is imperative to DevOps success. DevOps has many moving pieces working simultaneously and things happen fast, making it crucial that teams and individuals have an easy way to communicate and keep everyone on the same page. Wake is a collaboration tool that may help you do just that.
“Collaboration across the enterprise is critical for DevOps success,” I wrote recently in an article on the importance of effective collaboration. “Great code and development needs to make it over the finish line to production to benefit customers. The challenge organizations face is how to do that seamlessly and with as much speed and automation as possible without sacrificing quality or performance.”
“Just as open source is associated with cost savings and flexibility, DevOps is associated with speed and responsiveness,” stresses Jay Lyman, enterprise software analyst for 451 Research. “Enterprises are increasingly interested in initiating or growing their DevOps thinking and implementations, but they must be aware of the dramatic change it brings not only for technology and tools, but for people and process as well.”
Wake is a collaboration platform used by teams and developers at Facebook, Instacart, Zendesk and other organizations to communicate effectively and share work with others. Wake was created as an internal project at digital agency Bakken & Baeck by Chris Kalani, a former Facebook designer. Silicon Valley companies Medium and Airbnb loved it and begged to be able to use the product themselves, so it was spun off into its own company. When Wake launched last fall, 350 companies signed up in the first month, including Cisco Systems, OpenTable and Uber.
“Adjacent trends such as cloud computing, DevOps and containers are all speeding up the time it takes to iterate and deploy software and the movement of applications and workloads from test and dev to production, but the reality for enterprises is they cannot simply start fresh with a DevOps approach,” Lyman says. “Existing infrastructure, applications, people and process must be considered and integrated so that the transition to DevOps is not only less painful, but more realistic as well.”
Wake ostensibly helps facilitate the increased speed and agility by simplifying communication and collaboration. It has a bit of a Pinterest look and feel to it, but Wake makes it easy to share your progress on what you’re working on without leaving the application you’re working in. It connects with messaging systems such as Slack and HipChat, and you can find what you’re looking for quickly by searching for specific people or tags.
A Wake spokesperson tells me that Wake will soon launch significant updates to its enterprise product as it builds momentum with bigger brands including Capital One, Netflix and Mozilla. You can check out some use cases of Wake at Instacart, GoPro, Intercom, OpenTable and other places in this post on Medium.
Pricing starts at $125 per month for five contributors and 10 spectators. There is a Plus subscription for $350 per month that includes 15 contributors and 30 spectators. Beyond that, pricing is negotiated for larger organizations. You can try Wake for free for 30 days.