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Codeship, a Web-based continuous delivery service for testing and deploying code, announced it has received a funding round of $1.5 million from new and existing investors to build up the company.
This latest investment, mostly from existing investors like Sigma Prime Ventures, Boston Seed Capital and F-Prime Capital, brings the total funding raised till date to $4.4 million. Codeship was created to automate and simplify the DevOps process of release engineering, and this latest round will further accelerate the company’s growth and momentum.
Moritz Plassnig, CEO of Codeship, told eWEEK he considers release management to be one of the hardest parts of engineering after the original launch of a product for two main reasons. One is that new code or features have to be integrated into an existing product to add value over time. With an increasingly complicated product and more developers on board, it is harder to integrate code or features into the main code base. Resource constraints such as fewer testing servers or less powerful processors in development environment can lead to inefficiencies that impact a team’s output, he said.
Plassnig noted the other reason release management is difficult is that the production environment is virtually always different from the development environment. Imagine the sheer scale of millions of Facebook users using it every day in production, versus maybe a few hundred users testing it in development, he said. The burden is on release engineers to integrate code written by someone else into a different environment. Not only is this hard and redundant, but it causes friction between the different functional teams.
“Codeship helps development teams fully automate the deployment process, making release engineering essentially obsolete,” Plassnig said in an interview. “Our build automation software can test and deploy code directly to the production environment, simplifying the process of continuous integration. Being a hosted solution, companies can increase or decrease their capacity based on their needs such as memory, compute power or parallel processing of builds. Additionally, with the next generation version of our product, customers can use Codeship to create parity between their local and production environments, making the process of shipping code from development to production a seamless process—saving time, preventing friction, maintaining continuity of their applications and keeping customers happy.”
Codeship has seen significant growth in the past four years, having supported more than 8 million builds. Companies in over 70 countries have taken advantage of the speed in which Codeship’s continuous delivery and continuous integration solutions enable deployment; Codeship has supported millions of technology builds.
Research from Gartner identifies a significant market opportunity for companies that provide various DevOps toolkits and technology. In fact, the firm predicts that DevOps will become a mainstream strategy employed by more than a quarter of organizations worldwide.
Companies with a DevOps mindset are seeing huge benefits from cross-functional collaboration, Plassnig said. DevOps improves not just IT performance, but the overall organizational performance.
“Imagine releasing code in bite sizes; less bugs/issues, low impact on customer support, easier to integrate with existing product, easier for marketing to message, faster time to market of features, happier customers, and faster revenue growth,” he said. “Organizations that practice DevOps can embrace change a lot better and faster. A report from Puppet Labs summarizes the impact of DevOps: High-performing IT organizations deploy 30 times more frequently with 200 times shorter lead times; they have 60 times fewer failures and recover 168 times faster.”
Meanwhile, the funding will be used to expand Codeship’s presence among larger corporations, improve existing products and accelerate momentum through an expanded sales team.
Larger companies have really complex environments and needs, Plassnig said. They typically have larger, complicated team structures too, with more defined boundaries around functions of development and release engineering. So there are more stakeholders involved and a specialized skill set is required to educate them on how our solution best fits their needs.
“We will use the funding to scale a team of technically savvy sales representatives and refine the product by adding features that allow larger companies to integrate Codeship into their ecosystem of development tools,” he said. “Part of the funding will also be used to broaden our reach and increase awareness of our solution among bigger enterprises.”
Codeship’s advantage is that it turns a manual release process into an automated one.
“At Product Hunt we use Codeship as the backbone of our team’s test and deployment processes,” said Andreas Klinger, CTO of Product Hunt, a popular discovery site that surfaces the best new products and apps daily. “Because of them we can reliably ship awesome stuff on a daily basis. We’re thrilled about the Codeship team’s success as this only means their product and service will improve, allowing us to be a more efficient team.”
Plassnig added that by refining its products and beefing up operations, Codeship can scale more quickly and better support large companies with their DevOps needs.