Electric Cloud Automates Application Release Management

A Guide to Switching Development Teams in the Midst of a Project

When it comes to DevOps these days, continuous delivery is all the rage. The basic idea is that in an agile world of application development, software is being continuously updated. Obviously, that puts a lot of pressure on the IT operations team tasked with managing that process.

To help streamline that process, Electric Cloud this week launched ElectricFlow, a model-driven set of tools that automates the application build, test and deployment process.

Rohit Jainendra, chief product officer for Electric Cloud, says that without some ability to automate the application deployment process, the average IT organization can’t keep pace with the amount of code now being generated by developers. In the name of bringing new features and applications to market faster, organizations have embraced agile development methodologies. The problem facing IT operations teams is that the manual tools they have in place to manage the application deployment process were designed for an era where far fewer applications were updated and only a couple of times per year.

After recently raising another $12 million in funding, Electric Cloud is also making it easier for smaller teams of developers and IT operations to employ DevOps tools. Its ElectricCloudAccelerator Huddle is a free tool, currently in beta, that organizations can use to leverage unused processor capacity to build and distribute application tests prior to releasing an application.

While developers tend to find agile development liberating, the paradox that agile development creates is a need for a much more disciplined approach in a world where application releases arrive fast and furiously. That can happen at scale only when the application release management process itself becomes more automated than it generally is today.