What actually constitutes DevOps tends to vary widely by IT organization, but the one thing most of these efforts have in common is some form of continuous integration (CI) platform. Aiming to support interoperability across all the various tools, CloudBees, developer of the Jenkins CI platform, today announced a DevOps Express initiative that brings together 14 vendors across the DevOps space.
In addition, CloudBees today updated its CI platform to provide more insight into data flows alongside an enterprise edition of the platform. At the same time, the Jenkins open source community project itself unveiled a new user interface, dubbed Blue Ocean, for Jenkins.
At the Jenkins World 2016 conference, the vendors that have committed to making their tools interoperable and jointly defining reference architectures and best DevOps practices include founding members CloudBees and Sonatype, as well as Atlassian, BlazeMeter, CA Technologies, Chef, DevOps Institute, GitHub, Infostretch, JFrog, Puppet, Sauce Labs, SOASTA and SonarSource.
Andre Pino, vice president of marketing for CloudBees, says even though some of these vendors compete with one another, it’s become clear that in the interest of advancing DevOps adoption, multiple vendors across the category need to work more closely together.
“We need to better integrate the DevOps tool chain,” says Pino.
While the concept of getting IT operations teams and developers to work more closely together is generally viewed as a good idea, the number of IT organizations actually employing an integrated DevOps approach to developing and deploying remains relatively few. Pino says DevOps Express is an effort to make it easier for the majority of IT organizations to reduce the friction between tools that often hinders DevOps adoption.
In fact, Pino notes that as more companies come to realize that every company to one degree or another is a software company in the age of digital business, adoption of DevOps practices will undoubtedly increase. The challenge with DevOps in general is that it represents a new process enabled by a core set of technologies. As such, IT organizations can’t really buy DevOps. They need to put the tools in place to allow it to occur, but each organization’s approach to DevOps will be in one way or another unique to them.
In some organizations, DevOps may mean making IT infrastructure programmable to the point where developers don’t need to interact with IT operations teams at all. In other organizations, it means having developers and IT operations teams working more hand in glove. Regardless of how an organization achieves DevOps integration, the level of interoperability of the tools used to enable it will ultimately prove to be key to their success.