CloudBees announced today it has acquired ReleaseIQ, a provider of an orchestration platform for automating software delivery via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.
Sacha Labourey, chief strategy officer for CloudBees, said the addition of ReleaseIQ to the CloudBees platform will provide more visibility into and control over software delivery on an end-to-end basis.
CloudBees already provides a Flow orchestration engine within its continuous delivery platform. However, ReleaseIQ provides a similar capability across multiple continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms using a SaaS platform that is more accessible.
The ReleaseIQ platform is designed to enable DevOps teams to both create and maintain pipelines using a no-code tool. That enables greater transparency into workflows via dashboards that also provide optimization recommendations. That capability makes it much simpler to troubleshoot software deployments.
Labourey said that while ReleaseIQ can be integrated with multiple platforms including CloudBees CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab, Bamboo, ArgoCD and others, the primary focus will remain on the open source Jenkins platform that still owns the lion’s share of the DevOps market. The overall CloudBees goal remains to employ automation and remove as much friction as possible from DevOps workflows as part of an ongoing effort to improve developer productivity, he noted. CloudBees, however, regardless of the level of DevOps maturity within any organization, is committed to meeting customers where they are versus requiring them to rip and replace existing investments, Labourey added.
The overall level of DevOps maturity may vary widely both within and between organizations. However, as more organizations realize the extent to which they depend on software to drive digital business transformation processes, the need to further automate application development and delivery becomes more apparent. While CI is widely used today, the number of organizations that have consistently implemented CD is fairly limited. The underlying infrastructure that software is deployed on typically has a unique set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that each CD platform needs to support. Platforms such as ReleaseIQ provide a higher level of abstraction through which managing the pipelines that deliver software becomes simpler.
In general, most organizations are trying to strike some level of balance between centralizing the management of DevOps workflows and enabling development tools to adopt whatever tools they prefer. It’s not uncommon for application development teams to independently adopt any number of tools that ultimately need to be integrated with a DevOps toolchain. Each of those tools, however, contains metadata that needs to be shared with a centralized orchestration engine that automates a range of tasks across multiple pipelines based on the metadata collected from each tool.
There are, of course, still a lot of manual DevOps processes that should be automated. CloudBees is positioning ReleaseIQ as the orchestration engine for both unifying the management of pipelines and, ultimately. enabling value stream management across increasingly complex application development environments. It may take a while to fully realize that ambition, but with the acquisition of ReleaseIQ, a new foundation is being laid.
