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

Harness, the industry’s first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform, announced that it has acquired self-service Continuous Integration firm Drone.io, the creator of the popular open-source project Drone. The 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.

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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.”

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“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.

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