Fantastically named software acceleration company Incredibuild has this month ploughed a new furrow with its acquisition of Garden, a DevOps pipeline acceleration solutions company. Garden’s use of Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) capabilities are hoped to complement Incredibuild‘s C++ and “shader compilation” (the process by which OpenGL Shading Language scripts are loaded into OpenGL) acceleration technologies.
What’s in a DevOps pipeline?
All well and good, but what exactly is inside a DevOps pipeline? Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery is in there – obviously, that’s already part of this story. But we could also define the DevOps pipeline as a channel inside which we would expect to see automated testing (for bugs, duplications and redundancies etc.), validation technologies (to ensure the robustness and stability of code), manual gates for human override where needed, triggers (to determine when to execute the pipeline, which might be when a repository is pushed to live production status for example) and of course reporting.
Incredibuild will no doubt be looking to Garden for all of that and more. Garden is known for its open source tools designed to help developers to speed up CI pipelines, increasing deployment frequency and shortening development cycles.
Flushing out slow pipelines
“The acquisition of Garden advances our goal of taking the pain out of long development cycles,” said Tami Mazel Shachar, CEO of Incredibuild. “Customers have long complained that CI pipelines are slow, complicated and hard to manage, so we are excited to now accelerate the entire CI process. Garden’s expertise in streamlining CI pipelines and environments aligns perfectly with our mission.”
This acquisition is part of Incredibuild’s initiative to expand its singular product portfolio, providing developers a set of tools for accelerating development processes.
“What excites me most is our shared passion for making devs faster, and how together, we provide a complete suite of tools to help developers worldwide,” said Jon Edvald, CEO of Garden. “Incredibuild’s acceleration technology, combined with our approach to CI and DevOps, means we’re embarking on a mission to accelerate pipelines in every way, including changing developers’ interactions with automation across the development cycle. We have two extremely powerful products and united, the whole is even greater than the sum of its parts.”
What are shaders?
Incredibuild speeds up builds and compilations for game engines (which is why we see the “shading” reference at the start of this story i.e. shaders are used in computer graphics to break down objects and calculate light, darkness and colour as they also help define the geometry of an object), C++ development and CI/CD pipelines. Incredibuild’s platform of distributed and cached build acceleration, build observability tools and build orchestration software are used by developers and DevOps organisations both on-premises and in the cloud.
The technology on show here is also used outside of the games software application development space.
As DevOps continues its heyday as a widely accepted de facto term throughout the technology industry, it is perhaps worth remembering that IBM Rational was doing a lot of this stuff 25 years ago (except it wasn’t called DevOps at the time) and worrying about whether applications were merely being “thrown over the wall” to operations. That being said, we have clearly evolved a lot in the last quarter century and automations that can help some of the key pipeline factors (testing for sure) will arguably elevate this technology practice to new levels. Whether that results in better apps for all is still open to question, but the opportunity to do better is certainly there.