Tag: continuous integration

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LA-based Replicated adds former GitLab head of product as its chief product officer

Replicated, the Los Angeles-based company pitching monitoring and management services for Kubernetes-based applications, has managed to bring on the former head of product of the $2.75 billion-valued programming giant, GitLab, as its new chief product officer. 

Mark Pundsack is joining the company as it moves to scale its business. At GitLab Pundsack saw the company grow from 70 employees to 1,300 as it scaled its business through its on-premise offerings.

Replicated is hoping to bring the same kind of on-premise services to a broad array of enterprise clients, according to company chief executive Grant Miller.

First introduced to Replicated while working with CircleCI but it was the company’s newfound traction since the launch of its kubernetes deployment management toolkit that caused him to take a second look.

“The momentum that Replicated has created with their latest offering is tremendous; really changing the trajectory of the company,” said Pundsack in a statement. “When I was able to get close to the product, team, and customers, I knew this was something that I wanted to be a part of. This company is in such a unique position to create value throughout the entire enterprise software ecosystem; this sort of reach is incredibly rare. The potential reminds me a lot of the early days of GitLab.”

It’s a huge coup for Replicated, according to Miller.

“Mark created the core product strategy at GitLab; transforming GitLab from a source control company to a complete DevOps platform, with incredible support for Kubernetes,” said Miller. “There really isn’t a better background for a product leader at Replicated; Mark has witnessed GitLab’s evolution from a traditional on-prem installation towards a Kubernetes-based installation and management experience. This is the same transition that many of our customers are going through and Mark has already done it with one of the best. I have so much confidence that his involvement with our product will lead to more success for our customers.”

Pundsack is the second new executive hire from Replicated in six months as the company looks to bring more muscle to its c-suite and expand its operations.

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LA-based Replicated adds former GitLab head of product as its chief product officer

Replicated, the Los Angeles-based company pitching monitoring and management services for Kubernetes-based applications, has managed to bring on the former head of product of the $2.75 billion-valued programming giant, GitLab, as its new chief product officer. 

Mark Pundsack is joining the company as it moves to scale its business. At GitLab Pundsack saw the company grow from 70 employees to 1,300 as it scaled its business through its on-premise offerings.

Replicated is hoping to bring the same kind of on-premise services to a broad array of enterprise clients, according to company chief executive Grant Miller.

First introduced to Replicated while working with CircleCI but it was the company’s newfound traction since the launch of its kubernetes deployment management toolkit that caused him to take a second look.

“The momentum that Replicated has created with their latest offering is tremendous; really changing the trajectory of the company,” said Pundsack in a statement. “When I was able to get close to the product, team, and customers, I knew this was something that I wanted to be a part of. This company is in such a unique position to create value throughout the entire enterprise software ecosystem; this sort of reach is incredibly rare. The potential reminds me a lot of the early days of GitLab.”

It’s a huge coup for Replicated, according to Miller.

“Mark created the core product strategy at GitLab; transforming GitLab from a source control company to a complete DevOps platform, with incredible support for Kubernetes,” said Miller. “There really isn’t a better background for a product leader at Replicated; Mark has witnessed GitLab’s evolution from a traditional on-prem installation towards a Kubernetes-based installation and management experience. This is the same transition that many of our customers are going through and Mark has already done it with one of the best. I have so much confidence that his involvement with our product will lead to more success for our customers.”

Pundsack is the second new executive hire from Replicated in six months as the company looks to bring more muscle to its c-suite and expand its operations.

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The great stink in software pipelines

Greg Law Contributor
Greg Law is the co-founder and CTO at Undo.io, a software failure replay platform provider.

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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CircleCI launches improved AWS support

For about a year now, continuous integration and delivery service CircleCI has offered Orbs, a way to easily reuse commands and integrations with third-party services. Unsurprisingly, some of the most popular Orbs focus on AWS, as that’s where most of the company’s developers are either testing their code or deploying it. Today, right in time for AWS’s annual re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas, the company announced that it has now added Orb support for the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), which makes setting up automated CI/CD platforms for testing and deploying to AWS Lambda significantly easier.

In total, the company says, more than 11,000 organizations started using Orbs since it launched a year ago. Among the AWS-centric Orbs are those for building and updating images for the Amazon Elastic Container Services and the Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), for example, as well as AWS CodeDeploy support, an Orb for installing and configuring the AWS command line interface, an Orb for working with the S3 storage service and more.

“We’re just seeing a momentum of more and more companies being ready to adopt [managed services like Lambda, ECS and EKS], so this became really the ideal time to do most of the work with the product team at AWS that manages their serverless ecosystem and to add in this capability to leverage that serverless application model and really have this out of the box CI/CD flow ready for users who wanted to start adding these into to Lambda,” CircleCI VP of business development Tom Trahan told me. “I think when Lambda was in its earlier days, a lot of people would use it and they would use it and not necessarily follow the same software patterns and delivery flow that they might have with their traditional software. As they put more and more into Lambda and are really putting a lot more what I would call ‘production quality code’ out there to leverage. They realize they do want to have that same software delivery capability and discipline for Lambda as well.”

Trahan stressed that he’s still talking about early adopters and companies that started out as cloud-native companies, but these days, this group includes a lot of traditional companies, as well, that are now rapidly going through their own digital transformations.

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Idera acquires Travis CI

Travis CI, the popular Berlin-based open source continuous integration service, has been acquired by Idera, a company that offers a number of SQL database management and administration tools for both on-premises and cloud applications. The move comes at a time where other continuous integration services, including the likes of Circle CI, seem to be taking market share away from Travis CI.

Idera, which itself is owned by private equity firm TA Associates, says that Travis is complementary to its current testing tools business and that the acquisition will benefit its current customers. Idera’s other tools in its Testing Tools division are TestRail, Ranorex and Kiuwan. “We admire the business value driven by Travis CI and look forward to helping more customers achieve better and faster results,” said Suhail Malhotra, Idera’s General Manager for Travis CI .

Idera clearly wants to move into the DevOps business and continuous integration is obviously a major building block. This still feels like a bit of an odd acquisition, given that Idera isn’t exactly known for being on the leading edge of today’s technology (if it’s known at all). But Travis CI also brings 700,000 users to Idera and customers like IBM and Zendesk, so while we don’t know the cost of the acquisition, this is a big deal in the CI ecosystem.

“We are excited about our next chapter of growth with the Idera team,” said Konstantin Haase, a founder of Travis CI, in today’s announcement. “Our customers and partners will benefit from Idera’s highly complementary portfolio and ability to scale software businesses to the next level. Our goal is to attract as many users to Travis CI as possible, while staying true to our open source roots and community.”

That’s pretty much what all founders write (or what the acquiring company’s PR team writes for them), so we’ll have to see how Idera will steer Travis CI going forward.

In his blog post, Haase says that nothing will change for Travis CI users. “With the support from our new partners, we will be able to invest in expanding and improving our core product, to have Travis CI be the best Continuous Integration and Development solution for software projects out there,” he writes and also notes that the Travis CI will stay open source. “This is who we are, this is what made us successful.”