CircleCI today announced it has integrated its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform with a rival software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering from GitLab.
DevOps teams can now, for example, trigger pipelines in CircleCI from GitLab forked merge requests in addition to merging requests and making commits for specific branches. Other capabilities include the ability to access testing capabilities on the CircleCI platform and integrate permissions to ensure security.
CircleCI CEO Jim Rose said the company routinely integrates its CI/CD platform with other offerings because organizations typically have multiple teams using different version control platforms at different times. The goal is to give those teams access to capabilities and best practices regardless of which specific platform they are using.
In general, Rose said organizations are trying to strike a balance between the standardization of DevOps platforms and the need to enable development teams to innovate by adding new tools. Standardization tends to create more opportunities to automate more tasks in ways that reduce costs. However, developers will eventually rebel against any effort to limit the choice of tools they use to improve productivity, noted Rose. Too many senior IT leaders are quick to assume that a plethora of tools is an indication of a problem rather than the result of ongoing experimentation, he added.
In the wake of the global economic downturn, many organizations are also revisiting their existing DevOps workflows to try to increase overall efficiency by automating more tasks. Those organizations realize they can’t afford to continue throwing labor at manual DevOps tasks, Rose added.
The challenge, of course, is that building and deploying modern software is becoming more complex. Organizations are embracing microservices to make applications more resilient as they realize how dependent they are on software. The issue is that as the number of microservices continues to expand, it becomes apparent that legacy manual processes will not scale, said Rose. As a result, the impetus to automate DevOps processes becomes that much greater, he added. Less clear is to what degree organizations that have already embraced DevOps platforms might be willing to swap out their current CI/CD platform to achieve that goal.
In the meantime, more organizations are embracing DevOps to manage software development projects that drive a wide range of digital business transformation initiatives. The applications driving those processes typically need to be continuously updated as business requirements change. That becomes much easier to achieve when using processes optimized around continuous development and deployment.
Regardless of which underlying CI/CD platform organizations choose, they should assume that, eventually, some level of integration between those platforms will be necessary. After all, in the event of an acquisition, for example, it’s not likely both companies will have standardized on the same DevOps platform. Given the amount of time required to migrate from one DevOps platform to another the amount of time required for interoperability is inevitably going to be measured in months if not years.
