Mend.io today added an enterprise edition of the Mend Renovate IT automation framework to its portfolio that, in addition to enabling higher levels of horizontal scaling, also provides access to a Smart Merge Control feature that allows developers to customize the way pull requests are delivered based on how likely an update is to be backward-compatible.
In addition, the Mend Renovate Enterprise Edition provides access to premium levels of support.
Rhys Arkins, vice president of product for Mend.io, said that while Mend Renovate has gained traction among development teams, IT operations teams want to be able to deploy the IT automation platform in a way that can be centrally managed more easily.
Mend.io claims the open source edition of Mend Renovate has been downloaded more than a billion times, primarily by developers that prefer to use a command line interface (CLI) to automate workflows across multiple types of dependencies. Based on a container framework, Mend Renovate is designed to be deployed either in an on-premises or cloud computing environment. That approach is critical for organizations that today routinely deploy applications across a hybrid cloud computing environment using webhooks and job scheduler, noted Arkins.
In addition, Mend Renovate provides development teams with a confidence score that assesses the reliability of any update to a dependency based on the experiences of development teams that have previously updated a software component, said Arkin.
Just as importantly, any time there is an issue, Mend Renovate makes it simpler to roll back application updates as well, he added.
There are, of course, multiple IT automation frameworks that enterprise IT organizations might standardize on, but the Mend Renovate platform is designed to automatically update dependencies across a distributed computing environment in a way that makes developers more productive, said Arkins. In effect, Mend Renovate Enterprise Edition makes it simpler to shift more responsibility left toward developers in a way that can still be centrally managed, noted Arkins.
Each DevOps team will naturally embrace varying levels of automation based on their internal skills and requirements, but at a time when more organizations are encountering economic headwinds, there is clearly an increased emphasis on developer productivity. An IT automation framework can’t guarantee developers will be more productive, but it does reduce toil in a way that provides the opportunity for them to spend more time writing code versus managing application development workflows.
The challenge, as always, has been finding an approach to automation that developers will embrace. Many rival IT automation frameworks were designed primarily for IT operations teams rather than developers who tend to prefer CLI tools that are more familiar to them, noted Arkins.
In the longer term, it remains to be seen how generative artificial intelligence (AI) will be applied to IT automation, but the one thing that is certain is automation is becoming more accessible. The challenge and the opportunity now is to lay the foundation for those advances in a way that, starting today, improves the productivity of both developers and IT operations teams alike.
