The Shippable Blog

“I don't get no respect”

       - Rodney Dangerfield.

Today, we are very excited about launching a whole new user experience on app.shippable.com. In this blog, we will discuss some of the key tenets of our new UI and how you can improve your productivity with the new UI.

Last week, we announced the General Availability of Shippable Server, the behind-the-firewall version of our hosted platform. We also articulated our vision around where DevOps is today and why Assembly Lines is the future of DevOps.  

As I think about our journey from CI to Assembly Lines, it mirrors the journey of most organizations as they mature their DevOps efforts. In a nutshell, DevOps has created an awareness of the need to automate and be more efficient in terms of software delivery. However, most of the focus around the how has been around cultural changes and tools that help automate bits and pieces of the end-to-end software delivery workflow. This has led to the formation of "islands of automation" that are optimized for specific tasks but do not enable the holy grail of Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment. To achieve those goals, you need an Assembly Line platform that takes all these tools and connects them into end-to-end workflows with complete visibility, traceability, and auditability.

So let's take a look at this journey, and dig in a bit deeper into why Assembly Lines are the essential factor to DevOps success. 

Last week, we announced the General Availability for Shippable Server. With the announcement, we also articulated how we see DevOps: both as it is today and where the next wave is headed. For more context on our vision for the next wave, aka DevOps Assembly Lines, you can read our whitepaper.

However, before discussing evolution of DevOps, we found that most folks we spoke to were confused about the plethora of terms that are thrown around. A few are Continuous integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment, CI/CD, Application Release Automation (ARA), and Pipelines. Tool vendors seem to use these terms interchangeably, but they each have distinct meanings that you should understand so you can also figure out which part of the DevOps puzzle is addressed by the vendor. 

This blog provides definitions for each term along with some examples. We are working on a detailed whitepaper that will also include an opinionated list of tools available for each term below.