Harness Acquires Continuous Integration Pioneer Drone.io and Commits to Open Source

Acquisition marks company's entrance into the open source software community and establishes Harness as the complete CI/CD platform for cloud and container-native teams

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Harness

Aug 05, 2020, 09:00 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Harness, the industry's first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service™ platform, today announced that it has acquired self-service Continuous Integration firm Drone.io, the creator of the popular open-source project Drone. Today's news enters Harness into the open source software community and establishes Harness as the first self-service CI/CD platform for cloud and container-native applications. The addition of Drone.io's continuous integration to Harness' industry-leading continuous delivery platform will enable developers and DevOps engineers to build, test and deploy software on-demand, without delay or downtime.

As every business becomes a software business, the challenge to build, test and ship software becomes critical. Industry analysts validate that sentiment, with IDC projecting that the DevOps software market will reach $15 billion by 2023. However, there are many DevOps tools on the market that can't keep pace with today's modern platforms, processes and engineering requirements. Legacy continuous integration tools like Jenkins were written ten to fifteen years ago—pre-cloud computing—and require teams of engineers to manually script software delivery pipelines, instead of delivering innovation for their business.

Drone.io fills this gap. Instead of requiring scripts, continuous integration pipelines can be declared and managed as code in Git, which means they have standard syntax, require less work and are easy for engineers to create, use, maintain and troubleshoot. Drone.io plugins are all containerized—and therefore standardized—making them easy to download, use, upgrade and create. Drone.io can reduce the time and cost of continuous integration by 5-10X, so engineers can focus on writing code for the business versus scripting their CI builds, tests and pipelines. To validate this, Drone currently has over 50,000 active community users, including organizations like eBay, CapitalOne, Cisco and VMware, and is one of the most liked CI/CD projects on GitHub.

"Today's software developers are under incredible pressure to create and deploy new applications on-demand, yet a lack of automation means their current process is highly manual, time-consuming and error-prone," said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness. "With the acquisition of Drone.io, Harness will continue to simplify software delivery for developers, and will fully embrace, and commit to, the open source community so that we can accelerate the speed of software delivery together."

"I'm extremely proud of what our Drone community has accomplished, creating the first container-native CI self-service solution that is both simple and scalable for engineers to use. If you look at Harness Continuous Delivery, its DNA is similar to Drone – both are self-service, simple and scalable," said Brad Rydzewski, CEO and founder of Drone.io. "Together we can take CI/CD to the next level for our open-source and enterprise communities."

"With Drone, we can put the power of CI in our engineers' hands. Drone is simple and scalable, like a Swiss army knife for our few hundred engineers around the world. They can build and run their CI pipelines in containers, independently, without resource conflicts or bottlenecks. We spend less than a few hours a month administering Drone, so it's a light lift compared to CI tools we've managed before," said Jim Sheldon, Senior DevOps Engineer at Meltwater.

Harness will continue to invest, innovate and support Drone.io's open source community, and currently has several internal projects under consideration for open source. As part of the acquisition, Drone will continue to be open-source and free for the community, and will become Harness CI Community Edition. Drone Enterprise will be sold as Harness CI Essentials Edition. Later this year, Harness will introduce Harness CI Enterprise Edition, a next-generation approach to CI that will redefine how engineers build and test code in the cloud.

To learn more about Drone by Harness, visit https://harness.io/.

About Harness

Based in San Francisco, Harness is the industry's first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service™platform designed to provide a simple, safe and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses machine learning to detect the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight. Harness customers include NCR, Kohl's, Discover Financial, Nationwide Insurance and McAfee. Follow Harness on Twitter or try Harness for free at harness.io.

About Drone.io

With 21,000+ GitHub stars and a robust, active open source community, Drone is a leader in container-driven Continuous Integration. Drone empowers development teams to deliver software at unprecedented speed. Follow us on Twitter @droneio or on Github for news and product updates.

Media Contact
Francesca DeAnda
Mission North for Harness
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SOURCE Harness