The CI/CD and DevOps Blog

[The original post appeared as a guest post by Avi Cavale on Geekwire]

It all started at last year’s GeekWire ping pong and anniversary bash.

I had just founded my company, Qhode (now called Shippable). We were building a geeky product, a continuous integration and deployment service targeted at software developers. Even though we were solving a real problem, I had no idea how to market it.

I asked myself: How will people even find out about us?

After hosting our first Docker meetup in Bangalore, we were excited to host a Docker meetup at our new digs in downtown Seattle this week.  Thanks to the  Madrona Venture Group for letting us use their beautiful event space!

The evening kicked off with Hot Mama's pizza, beer, and some casual conversation, aka networking. By 6:45pm, we all settled down to listen to the evening's main talk - a presentation by our CEO Avi Cavale. Avi started off with introducing himself and our company. He then told everyone his favorite story - our journey from  VMs to LXCs and finally discovering Docker was the right fit for containerizing our hosted continuous integration and deployment service. (More on that was captured in our blog.) 

We are very happy to announce that Shippable 1.0 is now live! This a major step forward for us and we are super excited to bring it to you.

Key upgrades in this release include  -

Faster build speeds

Shippable is now more than 2X faster than our competitors -

• Our build minions (docker containers) spin up in a few seconds and come pre-installed with most languages and services to save installation time

• Minions persist your codebase and other custom packages between builds, so they will not be installed every time

• Node.js-based platform and SSD-based infrastructure

In April 2013, Shippable launched a Jenkins based CI using virtual machines (VMs). Our plan was simple - take the open source Jenkins, host it in the cloud, and start making money. After all, why would developers spend the time, effort, and money to set it up and maintain it when we were doing it for them for a few dollars a month?

Right? Nope.

Recently, Shippable was listed in the top 10 startups built on docker. Of the top 10 startups listed, Shippable is the only startup using Docker to do continuous integration and deployment.

Docker of course, is the open source Linux container engine and in a future post, we will talk about why Shippable chose Docker.