Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Buildkite has tightened the integration between its namesake continuous integration/continuous delivery platform and the GitHub source code repository.
Fred Showell, a senior product manager for Buildkite, said the integration will accelerate application development efforts using the Buildkite application in GitHub. Any connected GitHub account can be selected as a source when creating Buildkite pipelines, he noted.
Repository webhooks can also be created automatically, making it faster to kick off builds on a Buildkite pipeline from pull requests and then feed build information back into GitHub using the Status application programming interface (API).
The bulk of organizations that employ Buildkite are software vendors that are continuously updating software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Most of those organizations routinely employ software artifacts that are stored in the GitHub repository.
While GitHub continues to expand its DevOps capabilities in lockstep with its parent company Microsoft, Showell said there’s plenty of opportunity to extend capabilities of frameworks such as GitHub Actions, a set of APIs that DevOps tools can invoke to automate workflows.
In general, Showell noted the number of SaaS-based platforms continues to expand as organizations embrace cloud applications to drive digital business transformation initiatives. Some of those efforts are now also expanding to include use cases involving edge computing initiatives, which is expanding the reach and scope of the Buildkite platform, he said.
Of course, many enterprise IT organizations are now applying many of the same best DevOps practices employed by SaaS platform providers to their own application development efforts. Many of those organizations are realizing they are essentially software companies that also manufacture something or provide a service within the context of a specific vertical industry. As such, the number of organizations embracing best DevOps practices should substantially increase in the months ahead.
Most of those organizations are already trying to manage a large portfolio of applications. Digital business transformation initiatives may allow them to in time retire some of those applications, but chances are good legacy applications will need to be maintained for some time until the digital process that has been put in place proves effective. It’s likely then that sound software development lifecycle management practices will be more relevant than ever.
Competition among providers of CI/CD platforms to provide those capabilities is already fierce. Fueled by massive amounts of capital, providers of these platforms are expanding the scope of their offering to address a market that is expected to be valued in the tens of billions. Buildkite itself raised $28 million in additional funding last summer.
It’s too early to say how the next phase of the DevOps platform wars might play out. However, it’s apparent that when it comes to DevOps platforms the level of investment required just to keep pace is substantial.
