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Harness has acquired Drone.io, a continuous integration start-up with 50,000 active users including eBay, CapitalOne, Cisco and VMware.
Today (5 August), San Francisco-based ‘continuous delivery-as-a-service’ start-up Harness announced that it has acquired Drone.io.
Continuous integration (CI) firm Drone.io is the creator of open-source project Drone, which has more than 21,000 Github stars and an active open source community. Its self-service CI platform helps automate software building and testing.
The addition of Drone’s CI technology to Harness’ continuous delivery (CD) platform will now enable developers and DevOps engineers to build, test and deploy software on demand with no delay or downtime.
The deal marks a move into the open-source software community for Harness, which will now establish itself as a self-service CI/CD platform for cloud and container-native applications.
Drone’s tech
While there are many DevOps tools on the market, Harness said that several struggle to keep pace with today’s modern platforms, processes and engineering requirements. With Drone.io, CI 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.
Harness added: “Drone.io plugins are all containerised – and therefore standardised – making them easy to download, use, upgrade and create. Drone.io can reduce the time and cost of continuous integration by five to 10 times, so engineers can focus on writing code for the business versus scripting their CI builds, tests and pipelines.”
Among Drone’s 50,000 active community users are organisations such as eBay, CapitalOne, Cisco and VMware.
The acquisition
Commenting on the acquisition, Harness CEO and co-founder Jyoti Bansal said: “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.
“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.”
Drone.io founder and CEO Brad Rydzewski added he is “extremely proud” of what the Drone community has accomplished over the years.
“If you look at Harness continuous delivery, its DNA is similar to Drone – both are self-service, simple and scalable. Together we can take CI/CD to the next level for our open-source and enterprise customers.”
As part of the acquisition, Drone will continue to be open source and free for the community. Drone Enterprise will be sold as Harness CI Essentials Edition.
