With Agile development methodologies becoming more and more established within the larger global enterprise R&D organizations across the world, (such as many if not all of those that we are working with on a day-to-day basis), these days I would say it’s more surprising learning about development teams NOT thinking about and using concepts such as Continuous Integration/Testing/Deployment, SCRUM and rapid-feedback-loops than it is learning about those who do. With so much innovation and need for optimization out there, it’s natural that these initiatives are being introduced from the ground up even inside organizations where there historically has been a lot of legacy, politics and hierarchies acting as roadblocks.
Given this maturity of the Agile thinking these days, what we’ve seen with the recent introduction of the DevOps and Cloud Computing movements and concepts into software and product development is a natural and obvious evolution that I especially think, once established, will be really beneficial for the larger enterprise R&D organizations. There is a constantly growing number of good blogs and articles out there giving their take on what this means to the development community as a whole, but for those of you unfamiliar with these concepts, in short:
DevOps is the intersection of processes and responsibilities within Development, QA and Technology Operations
Cloud Computing provides an elastic general-purpose on-demand “cloud-like” infrastructure of computing resources, whether that be using on-premise/internal or public/external datacenters
The flexible and scalable technology that we at CloudBees offer fits in very nicely with this evolution and we are getting a lot of requests and interest from DevOps teams looking for ways to enable smart public or private development clouds, connecting the computing resources typically provided by IT to the Development teams constantly surging for more cycles on where to run their builds, tests and deployments. On our public website we’ve listed some of the unique capabilities within our solutions particularly interesting for anyone looking to enable their private development cloud:
I encourage you to click on each of the five links above to watch a short video/demo explaining what we mean with these in more detail, and let us know what you think.
Finally, as a follow-up to this blog post, watch out for a set of additional write-ups where I will go into more details for each of these five capabilities/solutions and couple that with some related customer case stories where the deployment in cloud-based environments and usage of our products by DevOps, Development and IT teams in many cases completely have changed the game in how these customers are now developing and producing their software and products. Interesting stuff!