DEVOPSdigest

Fourteen DevOps technology leaders have announced DevOps Express, an initiative to streamline the way enterprises transform their software development and delivery environments to DevOps.

The 14 members of DevOps Express include vendors spanning multiple solution categories in the software delivery process, as well as services organizations providing consulting, training and professional services. DevOps Express is the first-of-its -kind alliance of DevOps industry leaders and includes founding members CloudBees and Sonatype, joined by Atlassian, BlazeMeter, CA Technologies, Chef, DevOps Institute, GitHub, Infostretch, JFrog, Puppet, Sauce Labs, SOASTA and SonarSource.

As enterprises demand a steady stream of new software features to fuel their business, IT organizations are responding by adopting DevOps practices that require changes to processes, culture and tools. As organizations begin their DevOps transformation a number of key questions arise such as:

- Where do I start – with people, process or technology?

- What does a typical DevOps stack look like?

- How can I learn from industry leaders and others who have already started their transformation?

- How can I minimize risk that something won’t work?

- How do I ensure that different vendor technologies will work together in my environment?

These organizations are seeking information, best practices and technologies that can accelerate their path to DevOps.

DevOps Express is a solution-oriented approach designed to make it easier and more flexible for enterprises to adopt DevOps, using popular technologies spanning multiple solution components. DevOps Express provides a framework for industry partners to deliver reference architectures that are better integrated and better supported. Creating reliable and actionable reference architectures for organizations will accelerate DevOps adoption and minimize risk for organizations.

“Aspiring DevOps organizations encounter significant challenges with integrating a multitude of DevOps-related offerings,” said Donnie Berkholz, Research Director for Development, DevOps & IT Ops at 451 Research. “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.”

“We have worked with many enterprises transforming to a continuous delivery process and we see many of the same technologies used in each environment. That sparked for us the idea of DevOps Express – key DevOps vendors, working together as a group, to deliver greater value to the DevOps market than any of us could deliver individually,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees. “The combination of an alliance that includes popular technology vendors, coupled with our collective years of expertise, will enable a more streamlined approach to DevOps adoption and enable enterprises to realize business value more quickly.”

In an effort to dramatically ease the buyer’s journey, DevOps Express members will supply reference architectures that describe field-tested integrations of best-in-breed solutions residing on-premise and in the cloud. The new initiative will improve interoperability of a DevOps toolchain initially through verification of technology integrations with Jenkins. The partners will also form a support alliance to facilitate diagnosis and resolutions for enterprises when issues occur between the various alliance tools.

“By proactively integrating and supporting DevOps native solutions that have been proven in the real world, the founding members of DevOps Express are making it possible for organizations to accelerate their time to value,” said Wayne Jackson, CEO, Sonatype. “Our goal for DevOps Express is to create an essential resource for the community that is focused on an actionable buyer-oriented approach leveraging best-in-breed solutions.”

Jeff Scheaffer, SVP and GM Continuous Delivery and DevOps Business Unit, CA Technologies, added: “Increased collaboration represents the core of DevOps methodology, not just for software practitioners but also among the many technology providers that enable today’s integrated application workflows, making efforts such as DevOps Express critical to everyone’s success. At CA, we’ve long acknowledged the need for partnership across the entire application delivery ecosystem, so we’re proud to be a founding member of this consortium that will help organizations accelerate and simplify their DevOps transformation.”