Diving into DevOps

14 DevOps Leaders Join Forces

• By John K. Waters
• September 21, 2016

CloudBees, Sonatype, GitHub, CA Technologies and 10 other IT solutions and service providers have announced that they are forming an alliance with the goal of making it easier for enterprises to adopt the software stack needed to implement DevOps in their organizations.

Dubbed "DevOps Express," the alliance aims to "streamline the way enterprises transform their software development and delivery environments to DevOps."

The list of founding DevOps Express members also includes: Atlassian, BlazeMeter, Chef, the DevOps Institute, Infostretch, JFrog, Puppet, Sauce Labs, SOASTA and SonarSource.

The members of the alliance plan to work together to produce a framework for delivering DevOps reference architectures that are better integrated and better supported, explained André Pino, CloudBees' vice president of marketing. The reference architectures would describe field-tested integrations of best-of-breed solutions residing on-premises and in the cloud.

"We thought, if we all work together we should be able to deliver something of greater value to the market than any of us could deliver individually," he said during a press event at the recent Jenkins World user conference in Santa Clara, CA. "The joint goal is to bring more of a DevOps solution-oriented approach to the market."

It's an approach that will make it easier for enterprises to acquire, design, integrate and support DevOps native tools, he said.

If the initiative is successful, it will improve interoperability of a DevOps toolchain initially through verification of technology integrations with Jenkins, Pino said. The partners will also form a support alliance to facilitate diagnosis and resolutions for enterprises when issues occur between the various alliance tools.

A few of the companies, including CloudBees, the chief commercial supporter of the Jenkins continuous integration and delivery server, and Sonatype, the software supply chain automation company that created the Nexus repository manager, began talking about a potential alliance back in May.

"At its core, DevOps is about a culture of collaboration," said Derek Weeks, vice president and DevOps advocate at Sonatype. "It's about collaborating within the business to take the needless work out of the system and to get and keep things moving forward efficiently. And that's exactly what DevOps Express is doing. Instead of leaving people to wander around that show floor downstairs to find, assess, and assemble best-in-breed solutions themselves, we can extend that collaboration as a vendor community and help them to take a more efficient step forward."

But the alliance has no plans to evolve into a standards body, such as the Eclipse Foundation or the JCP, insisted Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees "That is not our goal," he said. "And we are not trying to build a new religion or anything like that. This is a very pragmatic group -- the fact that we have all agreed to work together, I think, shows that."

"Aspiring DevOps organizations encounter significant challenges with integrating a multitude of DevOps-related offerings," said 451 Research analyst Donnie Berkholz, in a statement. "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."

These are early days for the DevOps Express. Pino admitted that the members have yet to sit down for a true working session as a team. "We've had several planning sessions to get these 14 companies together for a one-of-a-kind alliance," he said. "We've got a few things to figure out, including our roadmap."

The group plans to meet formally sometime in October.