CloudBees has acquired Electric Cloud. The announcement came at the annual CloudBees Days event in San Francisco. The deal adds application release automation and accelerated build and testing capabilities to CloudBees existing CI/CD product suite. The acquisition will strengthen both CI and CD across the CloudBees product line. From the perspective of analysts Forrester, it makes CloudBees the No 1 in both areas.
In a statement, Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder, CloudBees said: “As of today, we provide customers with best-of-breed CI/CD software from a single vendor, establishing CloudBees as a continuous delivery powerhouse.
“By combining the strength of CloudBees, Electric Cloud, Jenkins and Jenkins X, CloudBees offers the best CI/CD solution for any application, from classic to Kubernetes, on-premise to cloud, self-managed to self-service.”
More than just improving CI/CD
This is more than just improving CloudBees position in the market. It helps it address a number of issues that large organisations are struggling with as they adopt CI/CD processes.
Christina Noren, Chief Product Officer, CloudBees talked about these issues prior to the news announcements. She said: “There is no point in developers having multiple releases per day if the organisation rolls that into one large monthly update.”
Noren is right. Large and even many mid-sized enterprises don’t want to be pushing changes continually to their production environments. They are aware that they need to increase the cadence of software delivery but do not want to risk their business.
This is where Electric Cloud brings new capabilities to CloudBees and in particular to its flagship Jenkins suite. It adds ElectricFlow, its deployment automation and application release orchestration tools. This makes it possible to integrate the often disparate processes across QA, pre-production, production and, importantly post production auditing. Each of these areas now gets its own set of pipelines that feed each other. The result is a single toolset that can be used to help teams move away from their current silos of products.
Another tool from this acquisition, ElectricAccelerator deals with testing and importantly, testing at scale. It addresses the situation that Noren described. It takes advantage of cloud computing to run large numbers of parallel builds and software tests. This speeds up the time taken to get software updates and features into production. When allied with ElectricFlow, it should help organisations begin to realise the promises that Agile and CI/CD have made.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a smart move by CloudBees. It strengthens its position in CI and, more importantly, gives it the number 1 spot in CD as defined by Forrester. It also positions it well ahead of the competition.
There is still work to be done. The tools from both companies need to be fully integrated. Users will want to bring their existing pipelines into the new solutions without having to make any changes. There will also be pressure on both companies to demonstrate just how much time is being saved. At DevOps World and Jenkins World in August, it will be interesting to see how much integration has been completed and how much is still left to do.
All of this is just the next stage on a journey that was also outlined by Noren. She talked about Software Delivery Management (SDM). Noren definition: “SDM is where Organisations manage software and feature delivery as a core business process for max adoption and impact.” She sees this as delivering the software teams a set of tools that allow the management of software delivery as a core business process.
We will be publishing an analyst note from our analyst partners Synonym Advisory on this in the next week.
