CloudBees today signaled its DevOps ambitions to extend well beyond the Jenkins continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform by acquiring Codeship, a provider of a CI/CD platform that is delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.
The decision to acquire Codeship is being driven by the need to engage smaller DevOps teams that don’t have the time or expertise required to set up on-premises instances of Jenkins, said CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey.
Codeship today is being used by more than 100,000 developers spanning 2,400 customers. Many of those developers are working at smaller companies. But Labourey noted that small teams of developers inside larger companies also prefer to invoke a CI/CD platform as a service.
“Different teams will decide to do different things in the same organization,” said Labourey.
The Codeship platform is not based on Jenkins and there is no plan to rehost the Codeship service on Jenkins, says Laborey. Jenkins is designed to be highly customizable by the organization that employs it. The Codeship service is a highly opinionated instance of multitenant CI/CD platform that is designed to provide a turnkey experience capable of support lots of developers at once, explained Labourey.
CloudBees will explore ways to bundle its core platform with the Codeship service for organizations that find themselves needing to deploy both a CI/CD platform on-premises in addition to a cloud service, he added.
The acquisition of Codeship signals a wave of coming consolidation across the DevOps sector, Labourey said, predicting that over time, a much smaller number of companies will account for most of the DevOps software and services sold. Some will rise from the ranks of the pioneers of DevOps. Others will be the same companies that today dominate application lifecycle management (ALM) and software development lifecycle (SDLC) software in the enterprise. As DevOps continues to gain momentum in the enterprise, it’s now only a matter of time before legacy ALM and SDLC vendors are forced to modernize their portfolios by making acquisitions or partnering with companies such as CloudBees, he said.
It’s too early to speculate how that consolidation might play out. But it’s clear the rise of microservices is about to force the DevOps issue in many enterprises. The rate at which DevOps processes have been adopted across enterprise has been uneven, but as organizations embrace microservices to build better applications faster, many will need to re-engineer their application development processes. There always will be monolithic enterprise applications that may be better-served by waterfall approaches to application development, but in time, the bulk of applications will be built employing microservices architectures that make it easier to update and manage applications employing modern DevOps best practices.
How much those DevOps processes will be based on CI/CD platforms running in the cloud or on-premises is anybody’s guess. More than likely, most organizations will rely on a combination of both, depending on the size and scope of their efforts. Regardless of the approach, however, at a time when every company is becoming more aware of their dependency on software to compete, it will be those organizations that embrace DevOps processes best that will prosper at the expense of rivals.