Octopus Deploy Acquires Codefresh to Modernize DevOps in Kubernetes Environments

Octopus Deploy this week announced it has acquired Codefresh as part of an effort to integrate a continuous integration (CI) platform with a continuous delivery (CD) platform designed for Kubernetes environments.

Codefresh makes it possible to consolidate the management of DevOps pipelines using GitOps workflows. The company is also an active maintainer of Argo, a declarative open source CI/CD platform optimized for Kubernetes environments originally built by Intuit that is now being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Octopus Deploy CEO Paul Stovell said the combined entity will enable the company to build and deploy modern cloud-native applications faster using a modern framework.

Codefresh CEO Raziel Tabib added that the combined entity will support the existing CD platform from Octopus Deploy and Argo.

Privately held Octopus Deploy currently has more than 4,000 customers with annual revenues in excess of $60 million and, unlike many rivals, is profitable, said Stovell. The company has been at the forefront of an effort to modernize DevOps workflows using an approach that depends less on scripts to integrate CI and CD processes. While most DevOps teams have embraced CI best practices, the number of organizations that employ a CD platform to automate the delivery of software remains comparatively small.

By streamlining DevOps pipelines using a CD platform that makes it possible to declaratively deploy applications, Octopus Deploy expects the number of organizations using a CD platform to continue to increase as more cloud-native applications are built, said Stovell.

It’s not clear how many DevOps teams are willing to deploy a new CI/CD platform. Many of them have spent years defining workflows based on legacy CI/CD platforms, so there is a lot of existing inertia that would need to be overcome when adopting a dedicated CD platform, even as they transition to build cloud-native applications alongside monolithic applications. However, as more organizations opt to build cloud-native applications using containers the more apparent it becomes that existing legacy CI/CD platforms will not enable organizations to sufficiently modernize their DevOps workflows, noted Stovell.

The acquisition of Codefresh comes at a time when many startup companies are finding it challenging to raise additional rounds of funding. As interest rates climb higher, many venture capital firms are not able to guarantee investors higher returns on their investments, so capital that once funded startup companies is not as readily available. Less clear is to what degree that issue is about to drive a wave of mergers, acquisitions and consolidation across the IT sector.

Regardless of which IT platform providers ultimately thrive, DevOps teams will inevitably need to revisit how applications are being built and deployed in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). As the amount of code generated continues to increase, existing approaches to managing DevOps pipelines are unlikely to scale. The challenge and the opportunity now is to determine how long existing platforms can be extended before a DevOps team needs to reengineer those workflows to manage codebases that are only going to increase exponentially.