continuous delivery
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The great stink in software pipelines
It’s the summer of 1858. London. The River Thames is overflowing with the smell of human and industrial waste. The exceptionally hot summer months have exacerbated the problem. But this did not just happen overnight. Failure to upkeep an aging sewer system and a growing population that used it contributed to a powder keg of effluent, bringing about cholera outbreaks and shrouding the city in a smell that would not go away.
To this day, Londoners still speak of the Great Stink. Recurring cholera infections led to the dawn of the field of epidemiology, a subject in which we have all recently become amateur enthusiasts.
Fast forward to 2020 and you’ll see that modern software pipelines face a similar “Great Stink” due, in no small part, to the vast adoption of continuous integration (CI), the practice of merging all developers’ working copies into a shared mainline several times a day, and continuous delivery (CD), the ability to get changes of all types — including new features, configuration changes, bug fixes and experiments — into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way.
While contemporary software failures won’t spread disease or emit the rancid smells of the past, they certainly reek of devastation, rendering billions of dollars lost and millions of developer hours wasted each year.
This kind of waste is antithetical to the intent of CI/CD. Everyone is employing CI/CD to accelerate software delivery; yet the ever-growing backlog of intermittent and sporadic test failures is doing the exact opposite. It’s become a growing sludge that is constantly being fed with failures faster than can be resolved. This backlog must be cleared to get CI/CD pipelines back to their full capabilities.
What value is there in a system that, in an effort to accelerate software delivery, knowingly leaves a backlog of bugs that does the exact opposite? We did not arrive at these practices by accident, and its practitioners are neither lazy nor incompetent so; how did we get here and what can we do to temper modern software development’s Great Stink?
Ticking time bombs
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Implement DevSecOps to transform your business to IT-as-code
Michael Fraser is an Air Force Veteran and co-founder of Refactr, a DevSecOps automation platform that helps tech teams modernize towards IT-as-code.
Conduct an online search and you’ll find close to one million websites offering their own definition of DevSecOps.
Why is it that domain experts and practitioners alike continue to iterate on analogous definitions? Likely, it’s because they’re all correct. DevSecOps is a union between culture, practice and tools providing continuous delivery to the end user. It’s an attitude; a commitment to baking security into the engineering process. It’s a practice; one that prioritizes processes that deliver functionality and speed without sacrificing security or test rigor. Finally, it’s a combination of automation tools; correctly pieced together, they increase business agility.
The goal of DevSecOps is to reach a future state where software defines everything. To get to this state, businesses must realize the DevSecOps mindset across every tech team, implement work processes that encourage cross-organizational collaboration, and leverage automation tools, such as for infrastructure, configuration management and security. To make the process repeatable and scalable, businesses must plug their solution into CI/CD pipelines, which remove manual errors, standardize deployments and accelerate product iterations. Completing this process, everything becomes code. I refer to this destination as “IT-as-code.”
Why is DevSecOps important?
Whichever way you cut it, DevSecOps, as a culture, practice or combination of tools, is of increasing importance. Particularly these days, with more consumers and businesses leaning on digital, enterprises find themselves in the irrefutable position of delivering with speed and scale. Digital transformation that would’ve taken years, or at the very least would’ve undergone a period of premeditation, is now urgent and compressed into a matter of months.
The keys to a successful DevSecOps program
Security and operations are a part of this new shift to IT, not just software delivery: A DevSecOps program succeeds when everyone, from security, to operations, to development, is not only part of the technical team but able to share information for repeatable use. Security, often seen as a blocker, will uphold the “secure by design” principle by automating security code testing and reviews, and educating engineers on secure design best practices. Operations, typically reactive to development, can troubleshoot incongruent merges between engineering and production proactively. However, currently, businesses are only familiar with utilizing automation for software delivery. They don’t know what automation means for security or operations. Figuring out how to apply the same methodology throughout the whole program and therefore the whole business is critical for success.
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New Harness product lets engineering teams monitor cloud spending in real time
One of the big advantages of using the cloud is ease of deployment. For engineers, being able to dial up infrastructure resources means being able to develop without delays, but it can also lead to big bills at the end of the month if you don’t know what you’re spending.
Harness wants to help with that, and today the startup released a product called Continuous Efficiency. It is designed to help engineering teams use cloud resources in a more cost-efficient manner, and do this in real time as they allocate resources.
Jyoti Bansal, co-founder and CEO at Harness, says that today most companies don’t know the extent of their cloud costs until the finance people get the bill at the end of the month. What’s more, the bill is entirely disconnected from the developers who are responsible for that cost. Finally, he says that at least 35% of that cost is waste, money they didn’t have to spend.
What Harness is hoping to do with this new product is give developers visibility into their spending with the goal that if they see how much waste they are generating they will dial back on usage.
“We are rethinking managing your cloud costs. From the perspective of developers, how do we give context sensitivity to developers so they get a full view of [what they are spending in the cloud],” he said.
Oftentimes, resources go unused or are over allocated, and giving visibility into this should let developers stay on budget, and in some cases save big bucks. To show how this works, the company says that one customer had a Kubernetes cluster configured with an annual cost of $1.6 million. After running the Continuous Efficiency product, it found that just 15% of the cluster compute resources were actually being used. After reconfiguring based on this data, they were able to save $1.3 million over the course of a year.
Image Credit: Harness
While Bansal says the product was in development long before the pandemic started, a tool like this at this particular moment in time is even more important as companies are looking for ways to cut costs.
Harness was founded in 2016 and has raised $80 million, according to Crunchbase data. Bansal formerly co-founded AppDynamics, a company that Cisco acquired in January 2017 for $3.7 billion.
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Sleuth raises $3M Seed to bring order to continuous deployment
Sleuth, an early stage startup from three former Atlassian employees, wants to bring some much-needed order to the continuous delivery process. Today, the company announced it has raised a $3 million seed round.
CRV led the round with participation from angel investors from New Relic, Atlassian and LaunchDarkly.
“Sleuth is a deployment tracker built to solve the confusion that comes when companies have adopted continuous delivery,” says CEO and co-founder Dylan Etkin. The company’s founders recognized that more and more companies were making the move to continuous delivery deployment, and they wanted to make it easier to track those deployments and figure out where the bottle necks were.
He says that typically, on any given DevOps team, there are perhaps two or three people who know how the entire system works, and with more people spread out now, it’s more important than ever that everyone has that capability. Etkin says Sleuth lets everyone on the team understand the underlying complexity of the delivery system with the goal of helping them understand the impact of a given change they made.
“Sleuth is trying to make that better by targeting the developer and really giving them a communications platform, so that they can discuss the [tools] and understand what is changing and who has changed what. And then more importantly, what is the impact of my change,” he explained.
Image Credit: Sleuth
The company was founded by three former Atlassian alumni — Ektin along with Michael Knighten and Don Brown — all of whom were among the first 50 employees at the now tremendously successful development tools company.
That kind of pedigree tends to get the attention of investors like CRV, but it is also telling that three companies including their former employer saw enough potential here to invest in the company, and be using the product.
Etkin recognizes this is a tricky time to launch an early-stage startup. He said that when he first entered the lock down, his inclination was to hunker down, but they concluded that their tool would have even greater utility at the moment. “The founders took stock and we were always building a tool that was great for remote teams and collaboration in general, and that hasn’t changed… if anything, I think it’s becoming more important right now.”
The company plans to spend the next 6-9 months refining the product, adding a few folks to the five person team and finding product-market fit. There is never an ideal time to start a company, but Sleuth believes now is its moment. It may not be easy, but they are taking a shot.
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Env0 announces $3.3M seed to bring more control to Infrastructure as Code
Env0, a startup that wants to help companies bring some order to delivery of Infrastructure as Code, announced a $3.3 million seed investment today and the release of the Beta of the company’s first product.
Boldstart Ventures and Grove Ventures co-led the round with participation from several angel investors including Guy Podjarny of Snyk.
Company co-founder and CEO Ohad Maislish says the ability of developers to deliver code quickly is a blessing and a curse, and his company wants to give IT some control over how and when code gets committed.
“The challenge companies have is how to balance between self-service and oversight of cloud resources in a cloud native kind of way, and to balance this with visibility, predictability, and most importantly, governance around cloud security and costs,” Maislish said.
The product lets companies define when it’s OK for developers to deliver code and how much they can spend instead of letting them deliver anything, at any time, at any cost. You do this by giving overall control of the process to an administrator, who can then define templates and projects. The templates define which repositories and products you can use for a given cloud vendor and the projects correlate to the users allowed to access those templates.
Image Credit: Env0
Ed Sim, founder and managing partner at Boldstart says the startup has been able to find a good balance between governance and the need for speed that today’s developers require in a continuous delivery environment. “Env0 is the first SaaS solution that meets all of those needs by offering self-service cloud environments with centralized governance,” Sim said in a statement.
It’s not easy launching an early-stage company in the middle of the current economic situation, but Maislish believes his company is in a decent position as it provides a way to control self-service development, something that is even more important when your developers are working from home outside of the purview of IT and security.
The company launched 18 months ago and has been in private beta for some time. Today marks the launch of the public beta. It currently has 10 employees.
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Continuous delivery pioneer CircleCI scores $100M Series E
CircleCI, an early adherent to the notion of continuous delivery when it launched in 2011, announced a $100 million Series E investment today. It comes on top of a $56 million round last July.
The round was led by IVP and Sapphire Ventures . Under the terms of the deal, Cack Wilhelm will be joining the CircleCI board. Jai Das from Sapphire will also be joining the board as an observer.
Today’s investment brings the total raised to $215 million, according to the company, with $156 million coming over the last 8 months. The company did not want to discuss its current valuation.
Circle CI CEO Jim Rose says with so much uncertainty because of COVID-19 he welcomes not only the money, but the quality of the firms and people involved in the investment.
“We’re really excited to get both IVP and Sapphire because they’ve seen all of it all the way through public and beyond. Given all of the nuttiness over the last few months obviously having cash on the balance sheet is extremely helpful, but the other part, too is that this a time when you want to have more brains around the table, not fewer. And so being able to get people to help out and just think about the problems that we’re encountering right now is really helpful,” Rose told TechCrunch .
Rose recognizes the huge challenge everyone is facing, but he sees this switch to remote workforces really driving the need for more automation, something his company is in a position to help DevOps teams with.
“What we’ve seen from a DevOps perspective is that this forced migration to remote-only for so many organizations has really driven the urgency for more automation in the DevOps pipeline,” he said.
He said this has led to a huge surge in usage on the platform in recent weeks, and today’s investment will at least partly go towards making sure there are enough resources in place to keep the platform stable whatever comes.
“When we think about money and we think about where we’re investing in the near term, we’re investing a lot in making sure that the platform is stable and available and supporting all of our customers as they go through this. You know this is a difficult time, a difficult transition and we’re trying to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to support our customers through that process,” Rose said.
Many companies at this stage of startup maturity begin to look ahead to an IPO, but Rose isn’t ready to discuss that, especially in the current economic climate. “We’re going to have to get folks to some kind of liquidity at some point, but I think right now our focus is on really investing in the platform and investing in our customers and then we’ll let the market clear out and figure out what the new normal looks like,” he said.
The company would consider making some acquisitions with its base of capital if the right opportunity came along. “We’re always evaluating and always looking around. One of the interesting things about our space is that it’s flooded with new and innovative approaches to point problems. There are a lot of companies that are interesting, so we’re definitely always looking around,” he said.
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Harness launches Continuous Insights to measure software team performance
Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder at Harness, has always been frustrated by the lack of tools to measure software development team performance. Harness is a tool that provides Continuous Delivery as a Service, and its latest offering, Continuous Insights, lets managers know exactly how their teams are performing.
Bansal says a traditional management maxim says that if you can’t measure a process, you can’t fix it, and Continuous Insights is designed to provide a way to measure engineering effectiveness. “People want to understand how good their software delivery processes are, and where they are tracking right now, and that’s what this product, Continuous Insights, is about,” Bansal explained.
He says that it is the first product in the market to provide this view of performance without pulling weeks or months of data. “How do you get data around what your current performance is like, and how fast you deliver software, or where the bottlenecks are, and that’s where there are currently a lot of visibility gaps,” he said. He adds, “Continuous Insights makes it extremely easy for engineering teams to clearly measure and track software delivery performance with customizable, dashboards.”
Harness measures four key metrics as defined by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) in their book Accelerate. These include deployment frequency, lead time, mean-time-to-recovery and failure change rate. “Any organization that can do a better job with these would would really out-innovate their peers and competitors,” he said. Conversely, companies doing badly on these four metrics are more likely to fall behind in the market.
Image: Harness
By measuring these four areas, it not only provides a way to track performance, he sees it as a way to gamify these metrics where each team tries to outdo one another around efficiency. While you would think that engineering would be the most data-driven organization, he says that up until now it has lacked the tooling. He hopes that Harness users will be able to bring that kind of rigor to engineering.
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CircleCI brings its continuous integration to Microsoft programmers for first time
CircleCI has been supporting continuous integration for Linux and Mac programmers for some time, but up until today, Microsoft developers have been left on the outside looking in. Today, the company changed that, announcing new support for Microsoft programmers using Windows Server 2019.
CircleCI, which announced a $56 million Series D investment last month, is surely looking for ways to expand its market reach, and providing support for Microsoft programmers is a good place to start, as it represents a huge untapped market for the company.
“We’re really happy to announce that we are going to support Windows because customers are asking for it. Windows [comprises] 40% of the development market, according to a Stack Overflow survey from earlier this year,” Alexey Klochay, CircleCI product manager for Windows, told TechCrunch.
Microsoft programmers could have used continuous integration before outside of CircleCI, but it was much harder. Klochay says that with CircleCI, they are getting a much more integrated solution. For starters, he says, developers can get up and running right away without the help of an engineer. “We give the power to developers to do exactly what they need to do at their own pace without getting locked into anything. We’re providing ease of use and ease of maintenance,” he explained.
CircleCI also provides greater visibility across a development team. “We are also giving companies tools to get better visibility into what everyone is building, and how everyone is interacting with the system,” he said.
Klochay says that much of this is possible because of the changes in Windows Server 2019, which was released last year. “Because of all the changes that Microsoft has been introducing in the latest Windows Server, it has been a smoother experience than if we had to start a year ago,” he said.
Nathan Dintenfass from CircleCI says that, in general, the Microsoft ecosystem has shifted in recent years to be more welcoming to the kind of approach that CircleCI provides for developers. “We have observed a maturation of the Windows ecosystem, and being more and more attracted to the kinds of teams that are investing in really high-throughput software delivery automation, while at the same time same a maturation of the underlying cloud infrastructure that makes Windows available, and makes it much easier for us to operate,” he explained.
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CircleCI closes $56M Series D investment as market for continuous delivery expands
CircleCI launched way back in 2011 when the notion of continuous delivery was just a twinkle in most developers’ eyes, but over the years with the rise of agile, containerization and DevOps, we’ve seen the idea of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) really begin to mainstream with developers. Today, CircleCI was rewarded with a $56 million Series D investment.
The round was led by Owl Rock Capital Partners and Next Equity. Existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Top Tier Capital, Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ), Baseline Ventures, Industry Ventures, Heavybit and Harrison Metal Capital also participated in the round. CircleCI’s most recent funding prior to this round was a $31 million Series C last January. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $115.5 million, according to the company.
CircleCI CEO Jim Rose sees a market that’s increasingly ready for the product his company is offering. “As we’re putting more money to work, there are just more folks that are now moving away from aspiring about doing continuous delivery and really leaning into the idea of, ‘We’re a software company, we need to know how to do this well, and we need to be able to automate all the steps between the time our developers are making changes to the code until that application gets in front of the customer,’ ” Rose told TechCrunch.
Rose sees a market that’s getting ready to explode and he wants to use the runway this money provides his company to take advantage of that growth. “Now, what we’re finding is that fintech companies, insurance companies, retailers — all of the more traditional brands — are now realizing they’re in a software business as well. And they’re really trying to build out the tool sets and the expertise to be effective at that. And so the real growth in our market is still right in front of us,” he said.
As CircleCI matures and the market follows suit, a natural question following a Series D investment is when the company might go public, but Rose was not ready to commit to anything yet. “We come at it from the perspective of keeping our heads down trying to build the best business and doing right by our customers. I’m sure at some point along the journey our investors will be itching for liquidity, but as it stands right now, everyone is really [focused]. I think what we have found is that the bulk of the market is just starting to arrive,” he said.
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Harness hauls in $60M Series B investment on $500M valuation
Series B rounds used to be about establishing a product-market fit, but for some startups the whole process seems to be accelerating. Harness, the startup founded by AppDynamics co-founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal is one of those companies that is putting the pedal the metal with his second startup, taking his learnings and a $60 million round to build the company much more quickly.
Harness already has an eye-popping half billion dollar valuation. It’s not terribly often I hear valuations in a Series B discussion. More typically CEOs want to talk growth rates, but Bansal volunteered the information, excited by the startup’s rapid development.
The round was led by IVP, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and ServiceNow Ventures. Existing investors Big Labs, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $80 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Bansal obviously made a fair bit of money when he sold AppDynamics to Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion and he could have rested after his great success. Instead he turned his attention almost immediately to a new challenge, helping companies move to a new continuous delivery model more rapidly by offering Continuous Delivery as a Service.
As companies move to containers and the cloud, they face challenges implementing new software delivery models. As is often the case, large web scale companies like Facebook, Google and Netflix have the resources to deliver these kinds of solutions quickly, but it’s much more difficult for most other companies.
Bansal saw an opportunity here to package continuous delivery approaches as a service. “Our approach in the market is Continuous Delivery as a Service, and instead of you trying to engineer this, you get this platform that can solve this problem and bring you the best tooling that a Google or Facebook or Netflix would have,” Basal explained.
The approach has gained traction quickly. The company has grown from 25 employees at launch in 2017 to 100 today. It boasts 50 enterprise customers including Home Depot, Santander Bank and McAfee.
He says that the continuous delivery piece could just be a starting point, and the money from the round will be plowed back into engineering efforts to expand the platform and solve other problems DevOps teams face with a modern software delivery approach.
Bansal admits that it’s unusual to have this kind of traction this early, and he says that his growth is much faster than it was at AppDynamics at the same stage, but he believes the opportunity here is huge as companies look for more efficient ways to deliver software. “I’m a little bit surprised. I thought this was a big problem when I started, but it’s an even bigger problem than I thought and how much pain was out there and how ready the market was to look at a very different way of solving this problem,” he said.
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