Shippable Extends Scope and Reach of CI Service

One of the attributes of building a continuous integration (CI) platform on top of Docker containers is that it’s highly portable. Shippable is making good on that promise by delivering versions of its namesake CI platform that can be employed on Mac OS X, CentOS and Windows platforms as well as to the Ubuntu distribution of Linux.

In addition, Shippable is make available a beta release of an analytics module that promises to improve overall DevOps efficiency.

Manisha Sahasrabudhe, vice president of product management for Shippable, said the company’s namesake CI platform for managing application release cycles now supports every type of platform commonly employed in a DevOps environment.

DevOps teams can now run jobs across multiple operating systems that share access to the same GitHub or Bitbucket repositories. The latest release of Shippable also provides those teams with the ability to granularly allocate a pool of available resources for each job running, Sahasrabudhe said.

Other new capabilities include support for custom scripts and images, as well as the ability to run tasks inside or out of a container.

Finally, Sahasrabudhe said DevOps teams can now also make of an analytics add-on module that DevOps teams can employ to identify bottlenecks, for example, and track various key performance indicators. The analytics module is intended to help organizations move more rapidly down the DevOps maturity curve.

Individual organizations are move down that maturity rate at significantly different paces. But when it comes to DevOps, Sahasrabudhe noted the larger the organization is the more chaotic IT tends to be. Because Shippable is made available as a software-as-service (SaaS) application, the company is in a unique position to enable organizations to compare how they are performing various tasks compared to the rest of the Shippable customer base. Those same organizations are also keenly interested in what’s holding up application development. They may not necessarily be able to eliminate a bottleneck, but deeper insights into the overall process should enable the organization to plan better, Sahasrabudhe said.

For example, organizations typically have a choice of programming tools at their disposal. Analytics could be applied to inform them as to how well any specific programming tool is being used to build specific applications by not only that organization, but also the entire Shippable customer base in aggregate, Sahasrabudhe said. Further on, Shippable also expects to be able to apply both machine and deep learning algorithms to the data its collects to provide even more predictive analytics, he said.

One of the primary reasons many organizations are starting to shift all kinds of management platforms into the cloud is to create a central repository of knowledge that can be easily accessed from anywhere in the globe. Most application development projects today are highly distributed endeavors. Hosting the tools needed to manage those projects enables developers to continue working locally on their own code, while still giving the organizations insights and control over the overall project.

Analytics provided via the cloud is not a substitute for a project manager. But it does provide a means for everyone across the organization, including business leaders, to have a much firmer grasp of the realities of modern application development.

— Mike Vizard