By now, you probably know that CodeShip is part of the CloudBees family as of early 2018. Today, that family has grown just a little bit - if you haven’t heard the news, CloudBees Feature Management has joined CloudBees to provide world-class feature flagging alongside our CI/CD and emerging data and insights capabilities. The CloudBees blog has a great post about CloudBees Feature Management that you can read, but I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about what CloudBees Feature Management means to CloudBees CodeShip and to the CodeShip community.
Same Worldview
The first thing I want to note - and one of the main reasons why our team is so excited to welcome CloudBees Feature Management and their team - is that the product philosophy for CloudBees Feature Management is completely aligned with what we care about as we build CloudBees CodeShip.
CloudBees Feature Management is a developer-focused product, with the best SDKs you’ll find in the feature flagging world and with an emphasis on security that puts your application and your team’s concerns first. It doesn’t sacrifice flexibility for usability - it makes a great effort to do both, with a great, easy to use UI backed by the type of implementation libraries you’ll want, to really control your releases in your preferred ways.
That paragraph describes CloudBees Feature Management, but most of it works just fine in describing CloudBees CodeShip as well. Both of our teams - and products - aim to put developer needs, security and time first. Flexible enough to let you work how you need, but simple enough and designed with enough developer intention that you can get back to working on the things you most care about as soon as possible.
Maturity
One of the things CloudBees CodeShip does best is help teams mature. Because we have both a UI mode and a more flexible config as code mode, CloudBees CodeShip uniquely lets teams start simply and evolve over time. Releases are a big part of that maturity - most teams, at some point, as their products grow, find that they need more flexibility in how they release new features and changes.
The CloudBees CodeShip team reached this point several years ago, and we built our own feature flagging solution. Since then, we’ve expanded it to regularly make use of feature flagged betas, canary releases and other forms of rolling updates. This flexibility is important, as not every feature needs the same kind of release and over time we’ve matured to understand when to do what most effectively.
CloudBees Feature Management wasn’t around when we started on the journey, but we’re glad it’s joining us now. We hope that all CloudBees CodeShip customers can make use of it as you mature into more sophisticated and complex release needs, or as you decide to replace - like ours - your time-intensive, home-grown solution with a product that can already handle all of that in a way that empowers rather than distracts you.
How it will fit in
With all of that said, it’s probably pretty clear how excited the CodeShip team is to have CloudBees Feature Management onboard. It’s rare to have such a great level of alignment - both in terms of needs and in terms of approach.
One question you might have is, will CloudBees CodeShip integrate with CloudBees Feature Management and if so, how? The answer to that is yes - but no specifics just yet. CloudBees CodeShip and CloudBees Feature Management already complement each other nicely even though they’re not formally integrated and it'll just keep on getting better and better as we develop the integration between the two apps. We’re already planning ways we can tighten the loop between CI/CD and feature flagging. We don’t have anything to share just yet, but we’ll let you know once we do.
Feedback
While we've got some pretty neat things planned, we'd very much like to hear your ideas on how you'd like to see feature flagging and CI/CD integrated, so get in touch and share those ideas with us!
Additional resources
Learn about canary releases using Jenkins X
Get started with CloudBees CodeShip
Read the documentation for CloudBees CodeShip