Development organization continue to feel increasing pressure to produce better code more quickly. To help accomplish that faster-better philosophy, a number of methodologies have emerged that that help organizations quickly merge individual code, test it, and deploy to production. While DevOps is actually a management methodology, it is predicated on an integrated pipeline that drives code from development to production deployment smoothly. In order to achieve these goals, companies have adopted continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tool sets. These tools, from companies such as Atlassian and GitLab, help developers to merge individual code into the deployable code bases that make up an application and then push them out to test and production environments.
Cloud vendors have lately been releasing their own CI/CD tools to their customers. In some cases, these are extensions of existing tools, such as Microsoft Visual Team Studio on Azure. Google’s recently announced Cloud Build as well as AWS CodeDeploy and CodePipeline are CI/CD tools developed specifically for their cloud environments. Cloud CI/CD tools are rarely all-encompassing and often rely on other open source or commercial products, such as Jenkins or Git, to achieve a full CI/CD pipeline.
These products represent more than just new entries into an increasingly crowded CI/CD market. They are clearly part of a longer-term strategy by cloud service providers to become so integrated into the DevOps pipeline that moving to a new vendor or adopting a multi-cloud strategy would be much more difficult. Many developers start with a single cloud service provider in order to explore cloud computing and deploy their initial applications. Adopting the cloud vendor’s CI/CD tools embeds the cloud vendor deeply in the development process. The cloud service provider is no longer sitting at the end of the development pipeline; They are integrated and vital to the development process itself. Even in the case where the cloud service provider CI/CD tools support hybrid cloud deployments, they are always designed for the cloud vendors own offerings. Google Cloud Build and Microsoft Visual Studio certainly follow this model.
There is danger for commercial vendors of CI/CD products outside these cloud vendors. They are now competing with native products, integrated into the sales and technical environment of the cloud vendor. Purchasing products from a cloud vendor is as easy as buying anything else from the cloud portal and they are immediately aware of the services the cloud vendor offers. No fuss, no muss.
This isn’t a problem for companies committed to a particular cloud service provider. Using native tools designed for the primary environment offers better integration, less work, and ease of use that is hard to achieve with external tools. The cost of these tools is often utility-based and, hence, elastic based on the amount of work product flowing through the pipeline. The trend toward native cloud CI/CD tools also helps explain Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub. GitHub, while cloud agnostic, will be much for powerful when completely integrated into Azure – for Microsoft customers anyway.
Building tools that strongly embed a particular cloud vendor into the DevOps pipeline is clearly strategic even if it promotes monoculture. There will be advantages for customers as well as cloud vendors. It remains to be seen if the advantages to customers overcome the inevitable vendor lock-in that the CI/CD tools are meant to create.