Another milestone in the march toward mainstream adoption of best DevOps practices was reached this week, with JFrog becoming a public company.
JFrog CTO Yoav Landman said the funding that the provider of a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform is receiving from investors is a clear vote of confidence in DevOps. The next major DevOps challenge will be finding ways to further automate the distribution of software across what is rapidly becoming a much more extended enterprise now that IT organizations are embracing various types of edge computing platforms, he said.
The injection of funding will be used in part to enable JFrog to address that challenge through a combination of internal product development and inorganic acquisitions, said Landman. The last few years have witnessed a wave of consolidation as providers of DevOps platforms expand their reach into adjacent categories.
At the same time, Landman said IT teams should expect to see JFrog investing more in various forms of artificial intelligence (AI) to further accelerate software development and deployment.
JFrog, as a leading proponent of DevOps, has been making a case for focusing specifically on application binaries rather than just source code. The building and deployment of application binaries is at the root of any digital business transformation initiative, noted Landman. As such, any organization that now views itself as some type of software company needs to master DevOps processes to succeed.
That requirement is also accelerating the rate at which CI and CD processes need to converge, he added. Most organizations that have embraced DevOps tend to master CI. CD has proven more challenging because each platform on which software is deployed is unique. JFrog addressed the challenges associated with CD first via its JFrog Artifactory platform before adding on the CI tools required to automate DevOps processes on an end-to-end basis.
In general, Landman noted there is now more focus on software supply chains as more organizations come to appreciate how dependent they are on applications to differentiate themselves from competitors. That issue is one of the main reasons the senior leadership of more companies are becoming more aware of the processes required to build and deploy quality applications consistently across an expanding number of platforms. In fact, it’s conceivable there might one day be more software running on edge computing platforms than in either local data centers or public clouds.
JFrog reportedly has more than 5,800 customers currently. It’s not clear to what degree organizations that have already embraced DevOps might be willing to replace their CI/CD platform or, in some cases, consolidate the multiple CI/CD platforms they already employ. However, as the number of organizations that are embracing best DevOps practices continues to grow there appears to be plenty of opportunity for providers of CI/CD platforms to grow as well.
