Seattle-based devops startup Shippable plans to release the server version of its flagship product Thursday, giving IT shops looking to improve the efficiency of their development process an on-premise version of the software.
Shippable’s software allows developers to automate a lot of the checks and balances that are part of modern software development. It works with a wide variety of popular software development tools, and breaks down barriers between different parts of an application development project to allow teams at large companies with compliance requirements to be as nimble as their cloud-native counterparts, said ping-pong wizard Avi Cavale, who is also CEO of Shippable, in an interview following his talk at the GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit Wednesday.
“Software engineering needs to become software manufacturing,” Cavale said, drawing an analogy between modern software development and the evolution of manufacturing from custom machine shops to much more efficient factory assembly lines.
While it’s probably true that nobody knows exactly how to define “devops,” as Heptio co-founder and CTO Joe Beda put it in a different Cloud Tech Summit talk on Wednesday, the basic understanding is that a devops philosophy calls for greater communication between software developers, operations engineers, and QA testers, Cavale said.
Teams working on a single project tend to find this idea easy to implement, but the problem comes when teams working on separate parts of development projects need to communicate with each other about pending deployments. That communication usually takes place ad hoc, with “people Slacking each other IP addresses” for deployment servers, he said.
Shippable Server allows those cross-team checks to be automated, giving administrators a much better picture of their environment across different projects. It also comes with monitoring tools and policy-setting knobs for greater control over which team members are allowed to push certain important buttons.
Shippable Server starts at $499 a year for cloud-based startups through the Amazon Web Services marketplace, and pricier supported versions are available for on-premise users.
