The last year was undeniably a different year for everybody. At the start of 2020, Coronavirus spread all over the world, resulting in a global pandemic. Covid affected the way we live, work, meet other people, and has drastically changed everyone’s lives in ways that we could not ever imagine.
In a world of uncertainty, DevOps has undeniably become even more important. At Codefresh, we worked feverishly on our DevOps platform expanding our features and helping our customers adapt and streamline their products with fast and stable deployments.
Announcing a new round of funding
While we have always looked for opportunities to meet in person, we have supported working remotely even prior to COVID. In that respect, COVID hasn’t stopped us from growing. On the contrary we have expanded and welcomed new Codefreshers globally.
To accelerate our growth we were happy to announce the closing of our C round earlier this year. Adding to our board Yaniv Stern, Red Dot Capital and Issac Roth, Shasta Venture who both are sharing our vision on how vital is the role of DevOps automation in today’s digital transformation, even more so during the pandemic.
In March, Gigaom also recognized Codefresh as an outperformer in enterprise CI/CD making us even more confident that we are moving in the right direction.
As with our previous rounds, we will use the resources to invest further in our DevOps solution and in open source tools that make deployments and releases faster and safer.
Secure pipelines with the Codefresh runner
This year, we solved some of the biggest challenges Enterprise and regulated businesses have when adopting CI/CD and DevOps automation by introducing the new Codefresh runner.
The Codefresh runner is a secure solution for running CI/CD pipelines behind the firewall, managing deployments behind the firewall, and monitoring and versioning every change, all while keeping confidential information (such as application source code and secrets) inside the perimeter. The Codefresh runner is a native Kubernetes application that gains all the advantages of your existing infrastructure. For example, if you already have auto-scaling enabled in a Kubernetes cluster, the Codefresh runner will take advantage of it as your build needs become larger.
The runner is installed in minutes, requires next to no maintenance, and keeps everything secure on your own network. There’s no longer any reason to use outdated tooling just because it’s self-managed.
More importantly though, the Codefresh runner completes the puzzle on how to handle DevOps in a secure environment, as now you can both deploy to private Kubernetes clusters as well as run pipelines on them with secure access to all your private services (Git repositories, databases, artifact storage, etc).
We believe that the Codefresh runner will make security-sensitive companies rethink their Kubernetes migration strategy as it allows them to use their own existing infrastructure with the power of Codefresh pipelines.
Launching GitOps 2.0 and co-founding the GitOps Working Group
Another big advancement in 2020 was the new GitOps dashboard. We believe that GitOps is the embodiment of several existing best practices (commit everything in Git, match cluster state with Git state, deploy by Git operations instead of adhoc kubectl commands) and we wanted to make it easier for everyone to adopt GitOps by removing as much complexity as possible.
In fact, the new GitOps dashboard is just a first step of our bigger GitOps 2.0 vision. We have already cataloged and documented the problems of the existing tooling and rather than reinventing the wheel we have committed to Helm and extending open-source solutions such as ArgoCD.
We also realized that we don’t have to be alone in this GitOps 2.0 vision. This is why we closed the year with the announcement of the new GitOps working group partnering with Amazon, Github, Microsoft, and Weaveworks. We are very excited about the creation of this group as it will propel GitOps forward in a well-controlled and vendor-neutral manner. You are welcome to join this group, as dozens of industry leading companies have already expressed interest in doing, and shape the future of GitOps.
Events and Webinars
One of the major realizations of this year was the proliferation of online meetings and webinars. Most in-person events were canceled in the beginning of the year. Some of them were converted to online events forcing our marketing department to completely change the way we talk to our customers and prospects. In this aspect, we were well prepared as online webinars and presentations were something we already did even before the pandemic.
In 2020, we invested heavily in virtual events and participated more than ever in online discussions. Here are some highlights:
- Best Blog Post + Webinar: Making the Business Case for DevOps
- Most Popular Webinar: 5 Simple Tips for Troubleshooting your Kubernetes Pods
- Best Customer Webinars: Automate Deployment Cycles & Release with Confidence with Vivint & Next Gen Deployments at Skillshare
- Best Virtual Panel discussion: Kubecon North America Hallway Track – Day 3
- Best CNCF Webinar: GitOps Continuous Delivery with Argo and Codefresh
- Best Virtual Event: The DevOps Conference
- Best Virtual Event Platform: Kubernetes & Cloud-Native Mixer. More Mixers are coming in 2021! Look out for the next St.Patrick’s Day Mixer.
Moving forward to 2021
Some other notable outcomes of this year:
- New environment board for both Kubernetes and Helm deployments.
- Buildkit support in our pipelines
- Invested in ArgoCD for our GitOps dashboard
- Native support for Kubernetes secrets in pipelines
- We have listened to our customers and prospects who asked for more communication channels and we have introduced our new Community Site for discussing any CI/CD related topics and ideas.
- Documented the business case behind DevOps – complete with calculators!
- Updated our platform for Helm 3
- Improved integrations and support with external registries with unique features like automated layer caching, build auto push etc, and migrated away from our GCR powered internal registry
Despite the pandemic, we never stopped investing in people. Our HR process had to adapt (onboarding new employees remotely is always a challenge) but even during 2020 we increased our personnel significantly and are still hiring for several positions and would love to meet you!
Stay safe and here’s to a magnificent 2021!