Five Ways to Scale Agile for the Enterprise
Thanks to the rise of Github, the notion that there should be a central repository for source code in the cloud has been pretty well established. But as useful as source code is, most IT organizations are struggling to manage binary images more than source code.
JFrog is taking the issue seriously. The company has raised another $7 million in funding from investors that now include VMware. JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim says that because of the rise of Agile development methodologies, IT organizations need a central repository in the cloud for managing binary images. Having a central repository for sharing source code with the open source community is one thing, but working with binary images that need to be continuously integrated requires a mechanism for delivering software in the enterprise.
Ben Haim says JFrog’s goal is to give IT organizations the ability to manage application development at scale.
Designed to cache software artifacts in a way that doesn’t require developers to constantly download software updates, Ben Haim says JFrog’s Artifactory binary repository manager along with the Bintray binary distribution platform make it simpler for IT organizations to manage updates to binary images that are constantly changing. In fact, Ben Haim argues that Agile development in the enterprise isn’t feasible without a continuous integration capability for binary images.
Naturally, there are already continuous integration tools available in the form of Jenkins and Hudson. However, instead of having to configure and manage those tools on their own servers, JFrog simply enables IT organizations to apply continuous integration to binary images via the cloud.
Thanks to the rise of the Web and mobile computing, the number of applications that IT organizations manage is growing, as are the number of updates being continuously made to those applications. All the while, developers are delivering more applications across the enterprise than ever. In fact, some developers contend that the whole concept of an application release is already obsolete. Given that new reality, it’s also clear that the traditional way that application development has been managed in the enterprise is heading in a similar direction.
