Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, April 19, 2024

Red Hat Sharpens DevOps Focus with Codenvy Deal 

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Red Hat has acquired another DevOps startup, this one focused on cloud-native development tools for container-based applications.

The company announced this week it is acquiring Codenvy, which was founded in 2013 to develop an enterprise version of the open source Eclipse Che framework, a cloud-native integrated development environment (IDE).

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) said Thursday (May 25) it plans to fold San Francisco-based Codenvy into its hosted development environment for building hybrid cloud services called OpenShift.io.

Codenvy's approach combines runtimes, projects and an IDE into a cloud-native tool that allows multiple developers to collaborate in the same workspace. Those container-based workspaces are accessed via a browser, eliminating the need to create a full-blown development platform.

Red Hat said it previously collaborated with Codenvy and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to develop a common protocol for integrating programming language across code editors and IDEs. Also last year, Red Hat joined the Eclipse Che group that among other tasks is supporting orchestration and composition formats for DevOps workspaces along with improving the building and testing of container images from within a development environment.

Developer workspaces based on Eclipse Che bundle the appropriate runtime stack, covering widely used programming languages ranging from C++ and Java to Python and Ruby on Rails. Rather than a simple web-based text editor, it is touted as a cloud-native IDE.

"Cloud workspaces make contributing to software projects easy," Tyler Jewell, Codenvy's founder and CEO, noted in a statement. "It’s a simple concept that drove growth in codenvy.io and open source Eclipse Che. Our container-based approach to development aligns with Red Hat’s focus on improving security features, reliability and performance in its container offerings."

With the addition of Codenvy's distribution of Eclipse Che to its OpenShift.io platform, Red Hat said it would target DevOps collaboration to accelerate deployment of micro-services in hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The open source leader is betting that Codenvy's tools, which run in Linux containers, will resonate with harried developers working on multiple projects concurrently, often in different programming languages. The pressure to continuously deliver cloud-native applications via containers is creating requirements for new DevOps tools that allow developers to push complex enterprise applications to production faster across different environments, the company argues.

Codenvy is already integrated with Red Hat OpenShift, the company's container application platform.

The deal for Codenvy, terms of which were not disclosed, is the latest in a string of acquisitions by Red Hat designed to beef up its DevOps capabilities as well as its OpenShift platform. In October 2015, the company acquired IT automation specialist Ansible Inc., reportedly paying more than $100 million.

 

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

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