A year ago, Runnable was a company focused almost entirely on copy/paste coding. Users could paste code into Runnable’s website, then see it in action as the site executed the code in a new window. Today, however, the company finished its pivot from testing window to testing servers.
As of today, Runnable now offers full-fledged staging servers for users. Given a project on GitHub, Runnable can add a button to a repository that will quickly result in the project being compiled into a container and spun up inside Runnable’s cloud.
Ken Olofsen has been the president and COO of Runnable for five months now. He said customers had been asking for this service, and that it grew out of a need they were seeing in the market.
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“Typically what you find is development teams set up a staging server that mimics production,” said Olofsen. “Then there’s this long development pipeline that developers follow to get their stuff into staging. While the industry is going through this microservices-based architectural revolution for developers, the reality is most teams are using a very dated development pipeline model that has this bottleneck.
“What Runnable has done is remove that bottleneck by giving every code change, every branch a full-stack environment. As soon as you create a branch in the code, we give you a link to that environment. That might include a database or a couple APIs and the database working together, and Runnable will set up the environment for that code change, allowing the developer to get really fast feedback.”
Yash Kumar, CEO and cofounder at Runnable, said, “We’re going to dismantle the development pipeline. The idea is build, test and all these phases all eventually lead to the code being pushed to some kind of environment where the developer can see all their pieces running together. Runnable makes these on-demand environments. All the steps are run in parallel. Our main point of integration is just the SCM.”
Runnable’s new staging server service launches today. The service is priced based on tiers, not usage, so developers do not have to worry about credits or how many servers are spun up in a month. Pricing ranges from US$9 per month to $49 per month, with enterprise pricing models coming soon.
