Shippable has released its new continuous delivery platform to help developers ship code faster. That’s what it says at the start of the press release which goes on to talk about end-to-end deployment pipelines. Continuous delivery is hardly new in the software world and neither is dev ops but combining the two is what Shippable is all about with this release.
In a blog by Manisha Sahasrabudhe, co-founder and VP Product Management at Shippable, she makes it clear that this release is not only about addressing customer feedback but also achieves the long-term goal of moving beyond continuous integration. Interestingly she also goes on to look at many of the key features customers have requested.
Software developers are no longer addressing just a single platform. Desktop has given way to multiple mobile platforms which are a problem. But it is cloud delivery that Shippable has focused upon. A year ago most developers were focused on one perhaps two cloud platforms but today they face the challenge of delivering code to multiple public clouds and their internal private clouds. With the rise of hybrid cloud they must enable their software to run anywhere.
What is Shippable announcing?
Shippable has restructured its products around three key pillars. According to the press release these are:
- Cloud portability: A cloud adapter means that apps can be moved across multiple cloud providers including Amazon ECS and Elastic Beanstalk, Google GKE, Microsoft Azure, as well as PaaS and IaaS providers.
- Choice and flexibility through plug-and-play integrations: Native integration with developer tools means that developers do not have to relearn how they work. There is currently native integration with source control providers (GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, Atlassian Bitbucket), container registries (Docker, Google GCR, Amazon ECR), notifications (email, Slack, IRC, HipChat), and many programming languages and services. Shippable is promising more depending on customer demand.
- A future-proof platform that eases adoption of new technologies: Customers can move at their own pace to adopt new technologies without being forced to adopt approaches that would otherwise require costly retraining and retooling.
All of this sounds OK and will get the interest of project managers and IT development teams. The question for many, however, will be able the underlying infrastructure and how it relates to the existing Shippable environment. With a claimed user based of over 50,000 developers and 8,000 organisations a lot of these will want to know what additions to the existing tools are including in this release.
Shippable has highlighted five key features and enhancements in the press release:
- Ability to customize Docker workflows
- Faster, more predictable builds
- Ability to run builds on any infrastructure
- Pipeline visualizations
- Expanded RESTful API
It will be interesting to see how many of the larger software vendors shipping their own tools for continuous development, integration, delivery and deployment decide to follow Shippable’s lead. While everyone is supporting containers, mostly versions of Docker, there is still integration work to be done around the rest of the software development ecosystem.
According to Avi Cavale, co-founder and CEO at Shippable. “Shippable makes developers more productive and delivers a higher quality result. More importantly, the pipeline we have built is flexible and future-proof.
“When you want to move to a new platform or a technology like microservices, our system supports this transition without requiring new tools or infrastructure. Developers can choose the tools they want, the right cloud for their apps, and where they want to run their builds. We automate the process and deliver actionable insights into their delivery pipeline against their chosen infrastructure.”
Conclusion
Shippable have done a good job reinventing themselves from dev ops to continuous development vendor. By targeting the need to deliver on multiple cloud environments they are offering development teams a way out of the pressure they are under to increase the speed of software delivery across multiple target environments.
