Continuous Integration/Continuous Development with FOSS Tools

Quentin Hartman — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 11:30:00 +0000

Up your DevOps game! Get the fundamentals of CI/CD with FOSS tools now!

One of the hottest topics within the DevOps space is Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). This attention has drawn lots of investment dollars, and a vast array of proprietary Software As A Service (SaaS) tools have been created in the CI/CD space, which traditionally has been dominated by free open-source software (FOSS) tools. Is FOSS still the right choice with the low cost of many of these SaaS options?

It depends. In many cases, the cost of self-hosting these FOSS tools will be greater than the cost to use a non-FOSS SaaS option. However, even in today's cloud-centric and SaaS-saturated world, you may have good reasons to self-host FOSS. Whatever those reasons may be, just don't forget that "Free" isn't free when it comes to keeping a service running reliably 24/7/365. If you're looking at FOSS as a means to save money, make sure you account for those costs.

Even with those costs accounted for, FOSS still delivers a lot of value, especially to small and medium-sized organizations that are taking their first steps into DevOps and CI/CD. Starting with a commercialized FOSS product is a great middle ground. It gives a smooth growth path into the more advanced proprietary features, allowing you to pay for those only once you need them. Often called Open Core, this approach isn't universally loved, but when applied well, it has allowed for a lot of value to be created for everyone involved.

An Embarrassment of Riches

The DevOps concept exploded in the past several years. The term quickly saturated the mainstream technology industry. With this increased mindshare comes a corresponding increase in the number of tools available to accomplish DevOps-related tasks. That's a blessing and a curse as a DevOps practitioner. Thanks to the endless buffet of options, you're sure to find something that meets your needs, but to a newcomer, the multitude of choices is overwhelming. Combine that with the vast scope of tasks that fall under the DevOps umbrella and the competing claims of "best" from all sides, and you have a recipe for paralysis. A good place for finding tools and filtering by a variety of criteria is DevOpsBookmarks.com. The content is all open source, and the maintainers are diligent about merging contributions, but it hasn't seen a lot of updates lately. Despite that, it makes a great jumping off point. If you find something noteworthy that should be included, a pull request would be appreciated!

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CI/CD and the New Generation of Software Delivery: an Interview with Harness

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 13:15:15 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is all the rage in the modern world of software development. But actually what is this pipeline process? It's a method or set of principles for which development teams implement and deliver code more frequently and reliably.

Continuous integration embodies a coding philosophy and set of practices propelling teams to implement small and frequent code changes into version control repositories, while the continuous delivery picks up where the CI ends and automates the application's delivery

Many platforms, such as Jenkins and CircleCI, exist to help companies and teams streamline the development and integration of their software stacks, but not much exists in the way of easing and automating the process of delivery. And with what does exist, the solutions tend to fall short with features and functionality, or they are overly complicated to configure in the first place.

This is where Harness comes into the picture. Harness produces the industry's very first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform. Using machine learning, it simplifies and automates the entire CD process. Steve Burton, VP of marketing at Harness, recently took the time to share more details with me.

Petros Koutoupis: Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Steve Burton: While officially the VP of marketing, I am a DevOps Evangelist over at Harness. What this means is that I do a little bit of everything. While most of my career has been in product management and marketing, I stepped out of the university with a bachelor's degree in computer science and an initial career in Java development (ca. 2004 at Sapient), working on large-scale enterprise J2EE implementations. Prior to Harness, I did geek stuff at AppDynamics, Moogsoft and Glassdoor. And when not knee-deep in take, I enjoy spending my time watching F1 and researching cars on the web.

PK: What is Harness?

SB: We provide Continuous Delivery as-a-Service. It's the CD bit of the CI/CD equation that helps customers automate how their software is deployed and delivered to end users in production.

We basically allow customers to move fast without breaking things, so they can increase developer velocity without the risk of downtime or failure.

PK: What problem or problems does Harness solve?

SB: Developers are under tremendous pressure to deliver applications to production, fast and with zero error. It's a constant pain, one that I personally dealt with as a former Java developer. Our founders had also seen this challenge firsthand, and that's why they started Harness.

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continuous integration

Continuous Integration/Continuous Development with FOSS Tools

An Embarrassment of Riches

CI/CD and the New Generation of Software Delivery: an Interview with Harness