CloudBees, at its DevOps World | Jenkins World 2018 conference this week, unveiled a broad strategy to extend the reach and scope of continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms based on the open source Jenkins software.
Company CEO Sascha Labourey said CloudBees Suite will provide the equivalent of a customer relationship management (CRM) application for software delivery. That approach will not only accelerate application development processes, but also provide application stakeholders across the enterprise with more visibility into DevOps processes. For example, business executives are demanding more visibility into DevOps processes as the organization begins to appreciate how dependent it is on the timely delivery of software, Labourey said.
Rather than buying isolated components of a CI/CD platform, the CloudBees suite provides a single pane of glass through which all the elements of the platform can be managed. That capability is critical because it enables an organization to start with one element of a CI/CD platform that, over time, can be expanded frictionlessly as the organization becomes more comfortable with DevOps processes.
Labourey said it’s clear the CI/CD platform is the hub around which those DevOps process revolve. The CloudBees Suite includes CloudBees Core to unify the management and governance of pipelines, which includes limited availability of the Kube CD for extending the CloudBees platform to Kubernetes clusters. In fact, Labourey noted that Kubernetes is rapidly emerging as the foundational element of a federated approach to CI/CD in the age of microservices.
CloudBees also announced an alliance through which Lenovo will provide IT organizations a turnkey set of servers running instances of CloudBees Core on the Red Hat OpenShift application development platform. As DevOps continues to evolve, Labourey said, organizations want to reduce the amount of time it takes their IT teams to deploy the infrastructure required for a modern application development platform.
Another core element of CloudBees Suite is CloudBees DevOptics, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that provides visibility and insights into value streams and operations as well as continuous reports on the four key DevOps metrics. CloudBees DevOptics will provide the raw data the company will rely on to apply artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of machine and deep learning algorithms to the CloudBees CI/CD platform, Labourey said.
The two remaining core modules of CloudBees Suite are CloudBees CodeShip, which enables organizations to jump start projects using a CI/CD as a Service offering, and CloudBees Jenkins Support, which provides users of the open source Jenkins platform full support. CloudBees is also making support for instances of Jenkins available as a standalone subscription service.
It’s clear that CloudBees is trying to extend the reach of its widely employed CI/CD environment not only to new platforms, but also to new users. As digital business processes continue to proliferate across the enterprise, there is now a lot more at stake whenever an application development project is delayed. While such delays may be inevitable, the degree to which organizations might be surprised by those delays can be reduced sharply when everyone in the organization is operating on the same DevOps page.
— Mike Vizard
