Things Come Together With DevOps Express

The race to deliver better software apps to market faster often has companies amassing a hodgepodge of tools that serve various parts of the software development lifecycle.

While the tools serve their individual purposes, a new problem has emerged: those tools often won’t easily work together. These painful integration issues can actually work against the core mission of DevOps by forming new walls between teams as SDLC teams are forced into painful games of tooling Twister just so they can work together.

Good news! Help is on the way. Worlds are colliding in DevOps, and the result should be more seamless tooling and automation integration — from planning to customer experience monitoring.

At the recent Jenkins World 2016 conference, 14 leading companies in the DevOps tooling and automation space announced they are teaming up to form a consortium aimed at integrating their development products. Participants included CloudBees, Sonatype, BlazeMeter, Atlassian, Chef, DevOps Institute, GitHub, Infostretch, JFrog, Puppet, Sauce Labs, SOASTA, and SonarSource. The big dog in the group is CA Technologies, whose strategy already included tools across the software development lifecycle.

Nearly simultaneous with the DevOps Express announcement was the word that CA had acquired BlazeMeter, a leader in open source-based continuous application performance testing.

“By providing an out-of-the-box experience with integrated, battle-tested solutions, the founding members of DevOps Express aim to make it easier for organizations to benefit from the experiences of early adopters,” said Donnie Berkholz, research director for Development, DevOps, and IT Ops at 451 Research.

Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees, said that the combined efforts “will enable a more streamlined approach to DevOps adoption and enable enterprises to realize business value more quickly.”

A fundamental part of the new consortium will have the members sharing reference architectures and other information to improve interoperability. But sharing architecture is likely just a start, as the companies pool their braintrusts to come up with new DevOps approaches, CA’s Aruna Ravichandran wrote over at DZone.

“I’m also looking forward to the opportunity to sit down as a group and brainstorm additional programs to benefit today’s DevOps practitioners,” she wrote. “These are heady times in the DevOps space, and there is a tremendous opportunity for innovation that will benefit everyone involved.”

Jeff Scheaffer, GM of Continuous Delivery and DevOps Business Unit at CA, said the consortium is aimed at helping companies maximize their significant investments in application development.

“We’ve found that companies spend about $60 billion a year testing and delivering custom applications into production, and about $58 billion of that is in labor — a very small portion in tools,” he told Alan Shimel of DevOps.com.

“The DevOps Express objective is to bring that toolchain together and make sure it works in order to meet that goal that customers have, which is software to production faster, higher quality and at dramatically lower cost.”