CloudBees Offers SalesForce-Like Features for Software Delivery Management 

CloudBees sponsored this post.

The first in a series of CloudBees’ software delivery management modules for its software delivery management platform became generally available Tuesday, as the firm continues to widen its offerings beyond Jenkins and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) management.

While software delivery management systems help to support CI/CD, the idea is to further support DevOps efficiency — a key theme of DevOps World 2020 that kicks off this week — by offering more visibility about the status and details about production pipelines and projects that an organization may have in progress — for all stakeholders, including business team members.

An engineer manager, for example, could use CloudBees’ software delivery management modules to gain a holistic view of production pipelines — instead of manually parsing through information gleaned from dozens of different monitoring tools and alerts to properly monitor and intervene when needed for specific projects. A business leader might also require more transparency about the status of different projects by accessing the info directly (as opposed to the days of just walking down the hall).

With CloudBees’ software delivery management, DevOps teams add another layer on top of its CI/CD backbone. It integrates information from various tools and platforms an organization might have in use, such as CloudBees’ platform for CI/CD, Jenkins or software delivery automation or from Git and other data sources. The end result is that CloudBees’ software delivery management (SDM) is like a CRM for CI/CD.

“It truly behaves a lot like Salesforce,” Sacha Labourey, CloudBees’ co-founder and CEO told The New Stack.

Many organizations have greatly improved agility and have succeeded in relying on CI/CD to increase the cadences at which their software is updated and deployed. However, in this case, when true agility is achieved, some business and engineer team leaders can lack direct control of processes and the visibility they need that CloudBees software delivery management offers, Labourey said.

Some business team leaders or other stakeholders sometimes might not know “what’s happening” in CI/CD and can’t closely track and follow projects, Labourey said. “These days, you can’t just raise your head out of the cubicle and ask how things are going,” Labourey said.

Among the features on offer, it is possible for an engineer or a product manager, for example, to create policies or rely on the automation capabilities to receive alerts when certain events occur. It is also possible to track how developers’ are pushing an application in order to see whether an application went through certain security checks.

“You achieve access to this knowledge of everything that’s happening in your organization,” Labourey said.

CloudBees will release new modules as time goes on, while today the first two modules are generally available. One of the two modules was created to help DevOps teams better coordinate feature releases and their scheduling. Non-technical DevOps stakeholders will have direct information and access to data they can use and understand to track software development statuses across an organization, in order to, among other things, ensure certain features are added during the CI/CD process.

CloudBees’s second software delivery management module was created to help boost engineering productivity and to support engineering team leaders and managers to better track quality control and timelines, by pooling together information from different data sources. An engineer managing a team might be able to see that the developer teams have so much technical debt that they’re spending 70% of their time solving the related issues — the module, in that case, would show how developers could more productive by spending more time on developing features or applications that meet specific user needs, Labourey said.

“This module looks at how your teams are operating — not just in a way like ‘is John working hard enough,’ but more like, ‘are we spending enough time working on features,’” as technical team leaders seek ways to have better visibility into how their teams’ development projects, Labourey said.

As mentioned above, CloudBees’ software delivery management releases are also part of CloudBees’ move to further expand on the scope of what it offers DevOps teams, as the CRM aspect of this release reflects — beyond offering tools and processes for Jenkins management.

CloudBees now offers, for example, software delivery automation, as well as software delivery management as part of its push to offer more support for DevOps.

During the last steps of the production process when applications are deployed, for example, “you need to be able to have all of the relevant meta-knowledge about the deployment,”  Labourey said. “It’s not just taking the bits and pushing them in a production environment.”

This year’s free-to-attend DevOpsWorld is one not to miss. Register today to watch more than 100 technical and business sessions, led by industry thought leaders. Take part in over 40 training and workshop opportunities and keynotes.

And tune in at 7:30 a.m. PST on Tuesday, Sept. 22, for The New Stack’s livestream coverage of the event after the day-one keynotes. TNS founder and Publisher Alex Williams will talk with Shawn Ahmed, senior vice president and general manager of the Software Delivery Automation Group at CloudBees, and distinguished engineer at Broadridge Daniel Ritchie. To watch, go to The New Stack’s Periscope channel.

Feature image by Brian McGowan on Unsplash.