Red Hat to Acquire Codenvy to Extend DevOps Tools Capability

Source – infoq.com

Red Hat has announced the acquisition of Codenvy, an Agile and cloud-native tools provider. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed.

Red Hat’s acquisition of Codenvy adds to its portfolio of development tools providing capability for container-based and cloud-native applications. Codenvy will be incorporated into Red Hat’s OpenShift.io environment – a hosted development environment for developers building hybrid cloud services that the firm announced earlier in the month.

Codenvy is based on Eclipse Che, an open source cloud integrated development environment (IDE) and developer workspace server. It provides a cloud-native collaborative workspace for developers by combining runtimes, projects and the IDE. Codenvy runs in Linux containers accessed via a browser.

Cloud-native IDEs allow developers to contribute to a project without installing a localhost developer workspace. In 2016, Red Hat and Codenvy collaborated with Microsoft in providing a common way of integrating programming languages across code editors and IDEs in the cloud. Codenvy started the Eclipse Che community which Red Hat also joined last year. Other contributors include SAP, Microsoft, Samsung, Serli and WSO2. 39 of the 70 contributors are from Codenvy.

Red Hat says that they plan to make Eclipse Che central to their tooling strategy and will extend and integrate the use of the cloud based developer workspace environment across their platforms.

Codenvy was founded in 2013 by Tyler Jewell, and has around 45 employees across five time zones. It had raised $10M in finance from Toba Capital and Auriga Ventures prior to the acquisition announcement. Jewell says about the industry adoption of containerisation technology:

Containers, while essential, shift application dependency burdens from operations to development. For developers, adopting the container paradigm gates writing and debugging code behind a complex abstraction that requires expert Linux knowledge. This makes developer productivity a huge issue for companies adopting containers.

In an interview with InfoQ’s editor-in-chief, Charles Humble, Jewell said: “Codenvy is a perfect strategic fit for Red Hat on two dimensions; firstly, Red Hat is going all in on containers. The second dimension is that the board and the company decided that developers were going to be a strategic discipline for them.”

Jewell went on to explain the future of the cloud-native workspace:

It’s really amazing – if we contextualise everything inside the workspace, once it’s contextualised then we can direct link to it. And when you can direct link to it then there’s this whole world of internet integrations that you can do. And you just can’t do that with the IDE on your desktop. There’s a ‘dirty secret’ that developers spend half their time managing their development infrastructure. The demands on these teams to release more frequently are increasing faster than their ability to manage this infrastructure. The only way these development teams are going to become more productive is if the development infrastructure becomes transparent and is managed for them. The only way you can do that is by having an end-to-end system where all these components are deployed and pre-integrated together based upon what the development team does.

DevOps is driving IT organisations to embrace continuous delivery and containers provide an opportunity to further increase the delivery velocity of change. Craig Muzilla, senior vice president, Application Platforms Business, Red Hat says:

Thanks to the increasing push towards digital transformation and the use of technology platforms, including apps, as a strategic business advantage, the role of the developer has never been more important. But, accelerated innovation through agile development requires news approaches and tools.

Red Hat has said that this acquisition is not expected to have any material impact on its earnings guidance for its first fiscal quarter (ending May 31, 2017) or fiscal year (ending February 28, 2018). No financial details have been shared and the acquisition is subject to the usual regulatory approvals.