Organizations must deliver high-quality software faster than ever before in order to stay competitive. While the end goal is Continuous Delivery (CD), many large enterprises are having trouble simply adopting a DevOps mindset or achieving even the prerequisite of Continuous Integration (CI). Electric Cloud eases the transition for teams by enabling end-to-end automation and acceleration so even the largest and most complex software organizations can speed the release of higher-quality products.
Electric Cloud powers CD with products that automate and accelerate build, test and application release processes at enterprise scale. Its unified approach to Continuous Delivery is easing the transition for companies of all sizes across industries, with leaders like Qualcomm, SpaceX, Cisco, GE, Gap and E*TRADE using Electric Cloud’s solutions to boost DevOps productivity and Agile throughput.
“Our mission is to help the world deliver better software, faster,” said Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud. “Many teams we talk to have figured out how to automate the delivery of a single application into production. Some have even figured out how to predictably automate the delivery of that same application to earlier Dev and Test environments. But when they need to start managing multiple applications, from multiple teams, across multiple environments—the complexity can be overwhelming. And that’s where Electric Cloud can help.
“If you’re operating at scale, you want everyone to have shared control and visibility over all of your tools and resources—including Build, QA or Production infrastructures, which can be on-premise or in the cloud,” said Wallgren. “Our products eliminate manual, error-prone work, coordinating and orchestrating tens, hundreds or even thousands of people, processes, resources and tools so Agile teams can efficiently bring high-quality products to market, faster.”
Automation at Enterprise Scale
ElectricFlow is a DevOps automation platform, which enables Dev, QA, Ops and Release teams to automate highly complex build, test and deployment processes at scale. With ElectricFlow, teams achieve repeatable, auditable and scalable software-delivery practices that improve software quality, speed time to market, and reduce costs.
ElectricFlow has been in the market for just over 12 months, but the underlying technology has been in use for years by some of the largest, most complex and most demanding global enterprises.
“’Enterprise-readiness’ tends to mean different things to different people,” said Wallgren. “Security and traceability? High availability? Scalability? Pipeline versioning? We’ve had years to add these and other features to the platform, which allows us to check all the boxes that our large customers care about.”
ElectricFlow fits neatly into the modern DevOps toolkit. It seamlessly integrates with the myriad of tools organizations use as part of their software-delivery life cycle, to offer centralized management, orchestration and reporting for the entire toolchain. The interfaces available to users include a modern Web UX, JRuby, Groovy and Perl-compliant CLIs, a Groovy-based DSL, REST, Plugin and platform APIs.
Shrink Cycle Times and Improve Productivity
“What we find within our larger customers, with hundreds or thousands of developers,
is that automation alone can’t solve their DevOps or CD problems. To achieve CI or CD, you need to amplify feedback loops, and provide fast feedback to developers. That’s impossible to do when builds and tests take too long to complete,” said Wallgren. “That is exactly where our patented ElectricAccelerator technology comes in.”
ElectricAccelerator supercharges Continuous Integration by dramatically accelerating software builds and tests, safely parallelizing jobs across any number of shared infrastructure resources without sacrificing build accuracy. ElectricAccelerator speeds up make-based builds as well as all kinds of test suites and static analysis, including Selenium, CppTest, Coverity, Klockwork, Parasoft, Boost and Code Coverage. “We recently had a large e-tail customer whose biggest roadblock to CI was their Selenium testing suite,” said Wallgren. “ElectricAccelerator was able to parallelize and speed up those tests by 60x.”
Powering the DevOps Community
DevOps is a team sport. It’s all about collaboration: bringing people and teams together to ask interesting questions, experiment and continuously improve. It is in this spirit of collaboration that Electric Cloud partnered with Gene Kim and ITRevolution to host the DevOps Enterprise Summit (#DOES15). Last year the conference sold out, and this year they have increased the size of the venue to ensure more people can participate.
In addition, Electric Cloud also hosts “Continuous Discussions” (#c9d9), an open forum to discuss Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery. Each episode focuses on a different software delivery use case, and features DevOps practitioners who join on a live video chat to discuss their views and share best practices.
“DevOps and Continuous Delivery are as much about people and process as technology,” said Wallgren. “To accelerate our mutual success, we focus on providing the most robust, end-to-end, enterprise-scale CD platform, alongside community programs designed to connect with peers and share tips and lessons learned—so that we can all become better, together!”
Learn more at electric-cloud.com.
