Buildkite Pty Ltd today revealed it has acquired Packagecloud as part of an effort to tightly integrate package management tools with its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.
Buildkite CEO Keith Pitt said the goal is to reduce the level of friction that exists between providers of third-party package management tools and CI/CD platforms that DevOps teams are today required to address themselves.
There is no shortage of package management tools used to configure, install and update software, but the level of integration between these tools and CI/CD platforms has not historically been very high. The acquisition of Packagecloud will result in a package manager becoming a first-class citizen within the context of a CI/CD platform, said Pitt.
Buildkite will maintain the existing support Packagecloud provides for platforms such as Jenkins, but the acquisition will streamline DevOps workflows and improve overall developer productivity, he added.
In the months ahead, Buildkite will also add a range of tools to better enable DevOps teams to achieve that goal, said Pitt. In addition, the company plans to add tools to streamline the management of compliance processes as regulations pertaining to application development are becoming more stringent, he added.
It’s not clear how much IT organizations are reevaluating their CI/CD platforms to improve developer productivity, but platform engineering as a methodology to centralize the management of DevOps workflows is gaining traction. Those efforts promise to reduce the total cost of implementing DevOps at scale and improve developer productivity by making the scaffolding required to build applications more readily accessible. Today, too many developers are spending time managing developer environments rather than writing actual code.
The challenge, of course, is convincing developers—who tend to jealously guard their tool prerogatives—to embrace a platform engineering methodology and cede control over the development environment to a centralized team.
One way or another, developer productivity needs to improve as more organizations encounter economic headwinds. Developers are the most expensive resource any organization has, so improving the rate at which high-quality code is created will always be imperative, noted Pitt.
Today, organizations depend on software to drive revenue. Investors are assessing senior leaders within those organizations on their ability to deliver quality software in a timely fashion. Each new application and subsequent software update now has a direct impact on the profitability of the organization. As such, tolerance for legacy approaches to building software that require more time and effort is dropping.
The issue, as always, is that switching from one software development platform to another is an expensive proposition, so many organizations may find themselves supporting a mix of legacy and modern platforms. The challenge becomes defining the pace at which that migration occurs as new applications are created and legacy applications are continuously updated.
