In this third spotlight on companies attending Jenkns World, another worth checking out came to mind, so I am taking a look at what XebiaLabs intends to do while there. XebiaLabs is one of the leading application release automation (ARA) vendors, and has a long history of working with Jenkins, so it’s a little more mainstream than the other companies I’ve written about.
But the thing is that Jenkins’ and XebiaLabs’ tools do work well together, offering an end-to-end build/deploy process that is repeatable and can be repurposed for different targets or different applications.
While Jenkins handles CI/CD, XebiaLabs ties in the deployment pieces to complete the picture and make a streamlined system. When I experimented with XL Release and XL Deploy, I used them to call Jenkins as part of the release process. Interestingly, you can also call them from within Jenkins, which dovetails well with what another vendor I looked at—CloudCoreo—is doing. The ability to control the process from Jenkins is nice and has uses in the early development phases, but XebiaLabs raises the level of release management—something Jenkins is not doing (yet). The bit that ties CI/CD to automated deployment should be running the show, IMO. But I can imagine environments where kicking off all the build/release cycle from within a Jenkins job would be the preference.
Anyway, on to what XebiaLabs is doing at Jenkins World!
Key for XebiaLabs this year will be showcasing its DevOps platform, which is both XL products and talking about how the company is advancing integration between these products and Jenkins. Its recent Templates as Code (the link is to an earlier version, from January, but talks about its goals with Templates as Code, so it’s a good start if this is new to you) implementation that made it easier for developers to work with its products is being enhanced, and I’d love it if someone took a look at it and told me what they think. I can probably get someone at XebiaLabs on the phone to talk about it, but real users often have a better take on suitability in the wild.
The important bit for many of you will be XebiaLabs’ Periodic Table of DevOps Tools, which I know several people would love to have as a poster in their office. For cool factor, it’s hard to beat. The company will have tubes with the periodic table available, so drop by to snag one. Last year it ran out of them relatively quickly, so be early. Bonus points to anyone who snags an extra and sends it to me for my office (ha ha).
Aside from the Periodic Table of DevOps, XebiaLabs also will have copies of “The DevOps Handbook,” which I recommend. For those who haven’t read it, the format is different than “The Phoenix Project,” but it is the next logical step in that progression. Finally, the company will have its own book, “The IT Manager’s Guide to Continuous Delivery,” which I haven’t read, but having read XebiaLabs’ corporate blog for a while now, I predict will have some good ideas in it.
I admit an interest in how recent changes to XebiaLabs’ DevOps platform improve the experience across the org (or don’t improve it). I haven’t used its tools since the new “pipeline as code” changes were introduced in January, so I honestly have no idea. If you go and stick around for a demo, let me know what you think.