CloudBees eases the DevOps journey with DevOptics

Moving upstream, up the value chain

In an interview, Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder of CloudBees, cited DevOptics as the company's biggest news of the Jenkins World event, as it signifies a move upstream for the company.

"Until now, we've been very focused on improving the way you deploy and consume Jenkins at scale," Labourey said. "We're evolving the strategy to also focus on the value people can get by using the platform."

Jenkins plays a very critical role in our DevOps journey. The reason we picked Jenkins is because it's free. Not like free beer, but like freedom.

CloudBees has always recorded the events that flow through Jenkins, such as who is contributing what code as part of what team for what application. But the company had not moved to make that information actionable until now.

"With DevOptics we're starting to store that information and we're able to give some in-depth insights on things companies can do to improve their software delivery story," Labourey said.

DevOptics is a service that looks through a Jenkins implementation and can send metrics and data to a centralized service. And based on that data, companies can extract key insight into their own DevOps story.

Augmented vocabulary for Jenkins

"To deliver on DevOptics, we had to augment the vocabulary of Jenkins," Labourey said. "Jenkins focuses on users and pipeline, and to get a higher-level view on things we had to augment that model to include teams and applications."

He noted that CloudBees had worked extensively with several key customers to deliver DevOptics.

"CloudBees DevOptics has the potential to provide critical insight into and across our complex continuous delivery pipelines to help us effectively guide our improvement initiatives and optimize our delivery capability," said Benjamin Williams, director of product engineering services at Temenos Group AG, a company specializing in financial software, in a statement.

Jenkins eases PayPal's DevOps journey

During a keynote at the conference, Moied Wahid, director of developer experience at PayPal, said Jenkins is key to PayPal's DevOps strategy, where it is "incredibly important for us to build and deliver software smoothly." PayPal has over 4,000 engineers working on 3,600 services operating on 70 million lines of code, he said.

"Jenkins plays a very critical role in our DevOps journey," Wahid said. "The reason we picked Jenkins is because it's free. Not like free beer, but like freedom."

Wahid further explained that when PayPal began its DevOps journey "it used to take days and months to go from feature development to production," he said. "Today we reduced the whole cycle time to less than 24 hours. My goal is to take this to less than five minutes."

CloudBees officials noted that DevOptics collects data across software delivery pipelines into a comprehensive live view, creating a single point of reference on the status of application delivery. This visibility also gives users insight into failed jobs and bottlenecks, and what caused them.

"DevOps has clearly gained tremendous adoption as the way to deliver software faster and align IT to the needs of the business," said Harpreet Singh, vice president of products at CloudBees, in a statement. "However, despite the investments made in DevOps, enterprises do not fully experience the benefits. This is because there is a lack of visibility in software delivery processes that inhibits making informed decisions."

Singh added that with CloudBees DevOptics, "organizations can measure, analyze and manage DevOps, revolutionizing how teams collaborate and, ultimately, optimize software delivery."

In addition, Singh noted that another component of DevOptics, known as DevOptics Pulse, which will focus on the health of users' systems, would be coming later this year.