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Integration Watch: The quickly changing market for continuous integration


By Andrew Binstock
June 9, 2009 — 
Continuous integration (CI) is a practice that, I believe, is very quietly gaining acceptance in IT. Two years ago, when I first wrote about CI, most folks who were not active in the agile community had never heard of it. Today, most everyone I speak to knows something about it.

I am a judge for the Jolt industry awards, presented by another company, and this year we had several CI products to examine for the first time. While adoption has steadily increased, my view is that the market is maturing quickly, with the predictable effect that users are consolidating around specific packages while ignoring other products.

Before getting into which products will make the cut, it’s necessary to first address an even more fundamental division in the market: enterprise vs. workgroup-scale CI servers. The distinction between the two levels is important in the selection of products. Enterprise CI servers are designed to manage more than builds, running tests and gathering metrics. They have an application development life-cycle management capability, including bill-of-materials inventory, deployment capabilities, release management, and deeper and more extensive process management tools.

In the category of enterprise CI servers, there are three products: Electric Cloud’s Electric Commander, IBM’s Build Forge and UrbanCode’s Anthill Pro. All three are big, expensive propositions that deliver considerable automation to build processes, as well as the early warning alerts implied by the term continuous in CI. UrbanCode provides a free copy to qualifying open-source projects. (To be clear, there is an open-source version of Anthill that’s been around for several years. However, it is completely unrelated to UrbanCode’s current product.)

The heart of the CI market is really in the sub-enterprise servers. These systems focus primarily or exclusively on managing the build, running tests, and storing metrics and statistics. This area has long been dominated by free, open-source products. The grandfather of them all is Cruise Control, which for several years defined the CI market.

Cruise Control was originally developed by ThoughtWorks, then was spun out as OSS, and now parts of it serve as the basis of ThoughtWorks’ new foray into CI, called Cruise. (Note, however, that Cruise is not at all a productized superset of Cruise Control but a different product entirely.)

The other big player in the sub-enterprise space is Hudson, an easy-to-use product that shot to fame 18 months ago and has subsequently attracted a wide following. These two products will survive the consolidation thanks to established and active user communities. However, the remaining CI products are distinctly imperiled.

In the FOSS arena, this means that Luntbuild and Apache Continuum will see shrinking interest. (In the case of Luntbuild, this decline is validated and quantified by its download statistics on SourceForge.) Luntbuild in particular represents a real loss to the community as it has a solid feature set and is, like Hudson, simple to set up and use. Apache Continuum was already imperiled by competition with Apache's other CI tool, Gump, which will surely experience Continuum’s fate.

Commercial products in this space are likely to feel pressure, but more slowly. The two primary products are Bamboo, from Atlassian, and TeamCity, from JetBrains, the same company that makes the highly regarded IntelliJ IDEA environment for Java and the ReSharper tool for .NET. Atlassian Bamboo is available free to open-source projects, and TeamCity is available at no cost for any project with up to 20 user accounts.

While both these products have strengths and weaknesses, I expect that Bamboo will survive in the long term, while TeamCity will be part of the consolidation. The reason for this is that Bamboo is integral to Atlassian’s product line and it is regularly revved. (For example, a recent version added capabilities to do builds on Amazon’s EC2 cloud.) TeamCity, however, is not central to JetBrains’ mission and is revved much less aggressively.

I don’t see much room in either market segment—enterprise or workgroup—for additional entrants, because the market is not that big in general and because of the wide availability of good, OSS products. In this context, ThoughtWorks’ recent decision to invest in Cruise is somewhat of a puzzle. The product, as it is now, is missing key features (for example, integration with SCM tools CVS and Rational ClearCase, and only partial support for Maven), and so it will require considerable additional investment before it can compete with its peers in either market segment. The question is how long a company whose stock in trade is consulting will invest in a product that is not central to their mission.

My guess is that ultimately this will prove a costly endeavor and the market will continue to consolidate around the products I identified earlier.

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.


Related Search Term(s): continuous integration


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Comments

06/10/2009 11:40:44 AM EST

Hi, you mentioned the Jolt awards and continuous integration, but you didn't mention OpenMake Software's Meister, which won a Jolt award this year and includes continuous integration with its build automation solution. OpenMake's Mojo Max, the continuous integration and workflow automation product recently won the Code Project's Reader's Choice award. We feel such industry distinction merits the mention of our products in this article. Our solution in fact extends further to providing more benefits to developers than the products you mention. OpenMake provides true build automation, where with most of the others your are required to create or customize your own build solution and the tool provides only a means to remotely execute the scripts and report back the result. Meister provides tight control of compile and archiving commands, dependency management, reporting, test automation, source code control integration and many other features out of the box with no scripting or complex XML configuration required. Perhaps if you were to write an article on the future of continuous integration, a future where developers are not required to spend valuable time to design, code, test and maintain their own scripts to have a continuous integration server do something meaningful, then it would be appropriate to highlight our solutions. I did enjoy your market analysis. We offer continuous integration as part of build automation, for which we have offered a uniquely robust solution for enterprises and workgroups for 14 years. Supporting a company solely on continuous integration (without build automation) and report consolidation seems risky, and that is also why our Mojo product is free for unlimited use. Sean Blanton, Ph.D. Sr. Architect and Agile Practice Leader

United StatesSean Blanton


06/12/2009 05:41:20 PM EST

Hi there, Interesting article. I couldn't help but write a blog post with some thoughts of my own on the subject: http://www.build-doctor.com/2009/06/12/continuous-integration-doom-and-goom Though, to be fair I think we should both get down the betting shop and wager on the outcome :) Julian.

United KingdomJulian Simpson


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