Agile Stacks Extends Reach of DevOps Automation Platform

Source:-devops.com

Company CEO John Mathon said that by extending the reach of the company’s platform to include Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure and Red Hat’s OpenShift distribution of Kubernetes alongside existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Agile Stacks will make it easier for organizations to implement best DevOps practices across hybrid cloud computing environments.

Agile Stacks made the announcement at the HPE Discover 2019 conference. The company counts Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) among its investors, and at the conference this week, HPE this week outlined how Kubernetes is core to the company’s evolving hybrid cloud computing strategy.

Mathon said the Agile Stacks platform provides a framework for automating the creation of DevOps pipelines across multiple tools and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms. In all, there are more than 80 DevOps tools and platforms available in the Agile Stacks Service Catalog, including Kubeflow, Jenkins, GitLab, Spinnaker, Harbor, Minio, Ceph and Portworx.

At the core of the Agile Stacks platform is a SuperHub automation hub, which accelerates software delivery based using a set of custom composable stacks that can be configured by the DevOps team. Each component of a stack is auto-configured to deploy, upgrade, rollback, promote, clone, backup, generate test scripts, perform merges, conduct performance testing, scan for vulnerabilities and execute functional testing.

In effect, Mathon said Agile Stacks is essentially automating the DevOps automation. Organizations that have embraced best DevOps practices tend to rely on multiple tools from different vendors, which inevitably leads to silos of automation that often work at cross purposes. Agile Stacks provides an extensible GitOps framework for integrating all those tools that enable organization to evolve more easily as their DevOps processes mature, added Mathon.

In addition, he said Agile Stacks expects to play a role in making DevOps more generally accessible by reducing the complexity organizations initially encounter when trying to embrace DevOps practices.

As hybrid cloud computing starts to become more commonplace, thanks in part to the rise of Kubernetes, Mathon said DevOps complexity is only likely to increase. Organizations have made it clear they want to leverage multiple clouds alongside their existing on-premises IT environment. Right now, however, the DevOps processes associated with each of those platforms is, at best, fragmented. In addition to making it easier to unify DevOps processes across multiple platforms, Mathon noted Agile Stacks can also enable organizations to keep better track of cloud spending by applying automated cloud tagging via Superhub.

Of course, most organizations are challenged automating the development and delivery of software on a single platform. However, regardless of how far down the path any organization is toward DevOps, the business is moving forward. In many cases, the rise of hybrid cloud computing will finally force many organizations to implement a set of best DevOps process enterprisewide. As part of that process, organizations will look to standardize on a specific set of DevOps tools whenever possible, or at least until developers discover the latest DevOps tool to supplant all others.