Harness today revealed it has acquired the assets of Armory, a provider of continuous deployment (CD) platforms based on the open source Spinnaker platform and a cloud service based on a proprietary platform it developed.
In addition, Harness is hiring some of the employees from Armory, including engineers, as it moves to integrate the CD technologies developed by Armory into its existing open source continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.
Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal said that while CI and CD need to be coupled, putting them into a single bucket is a disservice. Too many DevOps teams found themselves writing a lot of custom scripts to extend a CI platform to try and continuously deploy software, he added.
Those homegrown approaches to CD can be replaced by a platform supported by Harness that enables DevOps teams to employ a more declarative approach to continuously deploying software, noted Bansal. The acquisition of Armory’s assets enables a convergence of two CD platforms over the coming year that, for all intents and purposes, achieves the same goal, he added.
The number of organizations that routinely make use of a CD platform is still relatively small. However, as the pace of application development continues to accelerate, the need to automate CD will become a more pressing issue. Historically, each platform used to run applications has been unique, so automating delivery has been problematic.
However, as more IT teams start to build and deploy more complex microservices-based applications, it’s only a matter of time before CD becomes a more pressing issue. The challenge is enabling IT organizations to spend more time and effort on writing software by, for example, embracing platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale using the Harness platform, said Bansal. All the toil involved in DevOps today needs to go away in favor of intelligent automation increasingly enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), he added.
Each organization will need to naturally decide for themselves whether they want to deploy a CI/CD in an on-premises IT environment versus relying on a cloud service that manages the platform for them. Regardless of approach, the more accessible CI/CD platforms become the easier it will become for more organizations to adopt DevOps best practices. In effect, AI is driving the democratization of DevOps in ways that make it easier for many smaller organizations to build and deploy custom software using best practices that previously were limited to organizations that could afford to hire and retain large DevOps teams.
Less clear in the coming year is the degree to which there might be further consolidation of DevOps platforms in 2024, but the one thing that is certain is as advances in AI continue to be made, more organizations will be revisiting their DevOps platform options in 2024. The overall goal, as always, is to increase developer productivity by eliminating as many of the DevOps bottlenecks that often conspire to make application development unnecessarily complicated at a time when organizations have never been more dependent on software.