DevOps in the enterprise with new Shippable Server

Shippable announces the general availability of Shippable Server, the enterprise version of its popular DevOps platform, for organizations that want to ship code frequently and predictably but have strict security, compliance and control needs. The platform unifies all DevOps tools and processes into software “assembly lines” that provide complete visibility, traceability and audit trails across the end-to-end software delivery workflow.

Software delivery has evolved in the past decade as organizations adopt a “DevOps mindset.” As a result, development, test and operations teams have begun automating their tasks, and several tools vendors have emerged to support these activities. However, using a diverse and disconnected toolchain has now created  “islands of automation” that are optimized for each silo, but do not provide visibility, auditability and traceability across the entire workflow. Many teams try to compensate for this through inefficient methods like meetings, spreadsheets or Slack conversations. Alternatively, they build homegrown, point-to-point workflows between these islands that are fragile and difficult to scale.

Enterprises are particularly vulnerable to these challenges. First, they are often limited to tools that work behind the firewall due to enhanced security and compliance requirements. Second, they have larger teams and thus communication lapses are common. Third, they usually have a large number of applications with disparate requirements that lead to a lot of fragmented, “spaghetti” workflows.

Shippable Server helps enterprises overcome these challenges and ship quality code faster by unifying DevOps tools and activities into software assembly lines with rich telemetry. The platform can be installed behind the firewall and provides control and visibility across all DevOps tools and processes. Software teams can easily implement end-to-end workflows, including CI, deployments, testing, infrastructure, configuration and releases, with a simple YML-based declarative language. Workflows can be scaled easily, both horizontally across diverse applications, or vertically to allow for added complexity.

“This is the next wave of DevOps and brings the discipline of hyper-efficient manufacturing to software delivery,” says Avi Cavale, CEO at Shippable. “Companies like Amazon, Netflix and Google have spent many years and millions of dollars perfecting similar homegrown solutions, but most companies don’t have that kind of money and time. Shippable is built to bring that capability to every organization, irrespective of size.”

Key features

Security and control: Admins can configure roles and policies to decide who can do what. Teams have complete control over their infrastructure and machine configurations. Everything runs behind their firewall, so they are confident knowing that all their security and compliance requirements are met.

Automation: Tasks like provisioning, building, testing and managing releases with manual or automatic approval gates can be automated, minimizing the need for human interaction.

Visualization: The flow of shipping software from code to production can be visualized in an unified interactive dashboard across one or many applications in the organization. This view is updated in real-time and errors or bottlenecks in the workflow can be quickly identified and rectified. The view also includes analytics and audit trails.

Workflow: With a simple declarative yml config, teams can create sequenced jobs and resources needed to execute DevOps activities and notify interested parties with a stateful workflow engine.

Runtime: Teams can provision, configure and prepare environments needed for DevOps activities in a consistent manner to minimize errors and bugs and reduce setup and teardown time.

Operations: The platform provides continuous monitoring across the entire workflow to detect abnormalities, stop/rollback and fix problems in real-time during any phase of the DevOps workflow.

Integrations: The platform offers 80+ native connectors with all popular tools, technologies, and languages to create synergistic activities across diverse toolchains.