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New tool uses AI to roll back problematic continuous delivery builds automatically
As companies shift to CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), they face a problem around monitoring and fixing problems in builds that have been deployed. How do you deal with an issue after moving onto the next delivery milestone? Harness, the startup launched last year by AppDynamics founder Jyoti Bansal, wants to fix that with a new tool called 24×7 Service Guard.
The new tool is designed to help companies working with a continuous delivery process by monitoring all of the builds, regardless of when they were launched. What’s more, the company claims that using AI and machine learning, it can dial back a problematic build to one that worked in an automated fashion, freeing developers and operations to keep working without worry.
The company launched last year with a tool called Continuous Verification to verify that a continuous delivery build got deployed. With today’s announcement, Bansal says the company is taking this to another level to help understand what happens after you deploy.
The tool watches every build, even days after deployment, taking advantage of data from tools like AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic and Splunk, then using AI and machine learning to identify problems and bring them back to a working state without human intervention. What’s more, your team can get a unified view of performance and the quality of every build across all of your monitoring and logging tools.
“People are doing Continuous Delivery and struggling with it. They are also using these AI Ops kinds of products, which are watching things in production, and trying to figure out what’s wrong. What we are doing is we’re bringing the two together and ensuring nothing goes wrong,” Bansal explained.
24×7 Service Guard Console. Screenshot: Harness
He says that he brought this product to market because he saw enterprise companies struggling with CI/CD. He said the early messaging that you should move fast and break things really doesn’t work in enterprise settings. They need tooling that ensures that critical applications will keep running even with continuous builds (however you define that). “How do you enable developers so that they can move fast and make sure the business doesn’t get impacted. I feel that industry was underserved by this [earlier] message,” he said.
While it’s hard for any product to absolutely guarantee up-time, this one is providing tooling for companies who see the value of CI/CD, but are looking for a way to keep their applications up and running, so they aren’t constantly on this deploy/repair treadmill. If it works as described, it could help advance CI/CD, especially for large companies that need to learn to move faster and want assurances that when things break, they can be fixed in an automated fashion.
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Netlify just got $30 million to change the way developers build websites
Netlify wants to revolutionize the way developers build websites, abstracting away the web server and breaking web sites into microservices, making the process more like building a mobile application than a traditional website. Today, the company announced a $30M Series B investment to help continue to build on that vision.
Kleiner Perkins led the round. Andreessen Horowitz and the founders of Slack (Stewart Butterfield), Yelp (Jeremy Stoppelman) and Figma (Dylan Field) all participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $44 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Chris Bach, co-founder and president and Matt Biilmann, co-founder and CEO see the change they are trying to make as part of the larger shift to an API economy. They want to take the same ease of development APIs have given programmers in a mobile context and bring that to web development.
As I wrote earlier this year when they announced support for AWS Lambda, they want to reduce the complexity around web development:
“Netlify has abstracted away the concept of a web server, which it says is slow to deploy and hard to secure and scale. By shifting from a monolithic website to a static front end with back-end microservices, it believes it can solve security and scaling issues and deliver the site much faster.”
The founders have a grand vision, “We are basically out to replace all web servers with a with a global application delivery network,” Bach explained.
Mamoon Hamid, general partner at investor Kleiner Perkins says that while the website backend has evolved over recent years, the front end has remained static, and that’s what Netlify is addressing with their microservices-based approach to web development. “Netlify smack dab hits our view of where we need to go for the web to flourish,” Hamid told TechCrunch.
He believes the last shift of this magnitude in web development at the presentation layer was the advent of the CMS 15 years ago, and we are starting to see developers attracted to the Netlify approach in a big way. “We really believe that with this 300,000 strong developer force that’s already behind Netlify that they’re showing early signs of tapping into what could be the platform from which a significant portion of the web content is served from [in the future],” Hamid said.
Netlify is working to increase the number of websites running on their approach in the coming years and see this as a mission to change the web. “For us, it’s very important to keep being a place where developers want to go and very easily can get something up and running. And then you can scale from there,” Bach said.
The company wants to build out a more organized sales and marketing team to sell the Netlify approach to larger organizations, while continuing to build out the product and developer outreach. All of this takes money and that’s why they went for such a large round today.
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GitHub and Google reaffirm partnership with Cloud Build CI/CD tool integration
When Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion smackeroos in June, it sent some shock waves through the developer community as it is a key code repository. Google certainly took notice, but the two companies continue to work closely together. Today at Google Next, they announced an expansion of their partnership around Google’s new CI/CD tool, Cloud Build, which was unveiled this week at the conference.
Politics aside, the purpose of the integration is to make life easier for developers by reducing the need to switch between tools. If GitHub recognizes a Docker file without a corresponding CI/CD tool, the developer will be prompted to grab one from the GitHub Marketplace with Google Cloud Build offered prominently as one of the suggested tools.
Photo: GitHub
Should the developer choose to install Cloud Build, that’s where the tight integration comes into play. Developers can run Cloud Build against their code directly from GitHub, and the results will appear directly in the GitHub interface. They won’t have to switch applications to make this work together, and that should go a long way toward saving developer time and effort.
Google Cloud Build. Photo: Google
This is part of GitHub’s new “Smart Recommendations,” which will be rolling out to users in the coming months.
Melody Meckfessel, VP of Engineering for Google Cloud says that the two companies have a history and a context and they have always worked extremely well together on an engineer-to-engineer level. “We have been working together from an engineering standpoint for so many years. We both believe in doing the right thing for developers. We believe that success as it relates to cloud adoption comes from collaborating in the ecosystem,” she said.
Given that close relationship, it had to be disappointing on some level when Microsoft acquired GitHub. In fact, Google Cloud head, Diane Greene expressed sadness about the deal in an interview with CNBC earlier this week, but GitHub’s SVP of Technology Jason Warner believes that Microsoft will be a good steward and that the relationship with Google will remain strong.
Warner says the company’s founding principles were about not getting locked in to any particularly platform and he doesn’t see that changing after the acquisition is finalized. “One of the things that was critical in any discussion about an acquisition was that GitHub shall remain an open platform,” Warner explained.
He indicated that today’s announcement is just a starting point, and the two companies intend to build on this integration moving forward. “We worked pretty closely on this together. This announcement is a nod to some of the future oriented partnerships that we will be announcing later in the year,” he said. And that partnership should continue unabated, even after the Microsoft acquisition is finalized later this year.
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Apple and GE announce deep partnership
While Apple has had its share of enterprise partners in recent years including IBM, Cisco and SAP, today’s announcement that it will be working directly with GE feels a bit different with the two companies more closely intertwined than in previous deals. Apple and GE have committed to build a set of development tools and to develop apps together using Apple’s design sensibility… Read More
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Atlassian launches a new subscription bundle that includes all of its developer tools
Atlassian today announced the launch of Atlassian Stack, a new subscription service that bundles virtually all of the company’s self-hosted developer tools into a single offering. Starting at $186,875 per year for 1,000 licenses, this new bundle is meant to make the procurement process for enterprises easier and cheaper (despite what looks like an eye watering price at first). Instead… Read More
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New version of Google App Engine supports all programming languages
Google announced that an entirely overhauled version of App Engine was generally available as of today. It made the announcement at Google Cloud Next being held this week in San Francisco.
App Engine is Google’s platform-as-a-service for building application backends without having to worry about maintaining a complex infrastructure.
The big news is that App Engine now supports any… Read More
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Atlassian keeps one foot in the data center and one in the cloud with new products
Atlassian wants the best of both the cloud and data center worlds, and it announced at the Atlassian Summit today that it was expanding its data center-cloud strategy with new products. At a time when companies are shifting their business to the cloud, it may seem like an odd approach to offer both cloud and on-prem products, but Atlassian sees it as hedging its bets in a world that remains… Read More
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JFrog Takes Big Leap Forward With $50 Million Round
JFrog, a developer of open source software distribution tools, announced a $50 million round today. The investment represents a substantial jump for the company, which previously had raised $10.5 million across two rounds. Investors include Scale Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners and Qumra Capital, as well as participation from existing… Read More
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