Shippable and Packet Collaborate on Native Arm CI/CD

DevOps automation platform, Shippable , and bare metal cloud provider, Packet , have jointly announced a new hosted continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) capability for developers working on software applications for Arm®v8-A architecture. The solution allows open source and commercial software projects to build and validate their software on-demand on Arm-based machines from Packet's cloud.

Prior to the availability of native Arm support, developers used emulators while building and validating their code which do not always detect architecture specific artefacts being introduced in their codebases. Arm developers working on open source projects can now run their build and test workflows for free on 32-bit and 64-bit Arm-based machines from Packet's Cloud. Commercial projects can 'Bring Their Own Arm Node' and use Shippable to execute their software validation workflows by provisioning a machine on Packet cloud and adding it as a build node to a Shippable subscription. If an organisation has their own Arm machines those can be also be included.

Organisations will typically choose Bring Your Own Node (BYON) when they don't want their source code to leave their firewall and/or infrastructure for security reasons or their jobs need access to dependencies that cannot be accessed from outside their network. BYON also allows for running jobs on platforms that are not natively supported with on-demand nodes, such as MacOS.

InfoQ spoke to Avi Cavale , CEO at Shippable, about the announcement:

InfoQ: When engineers deploy to Arm, what OS are they using if it's not Ubuntu, MacOS or Windows?

Cavale:They can use Ubuntu variants or some variants of Linux, Android, etc. Arm is an architecture, just like Intel x86/64, so there are multiple OS that can run on Arm, including some written specifically for Arm. Arm is a standard choice for mobile computing and any area where power consumption and chip size is a consideration, such as Internet of Things (IoT).

InfoQ: What tests can the Shippable solution perform? Does it use any other tools?

Cavale:Shippable can be used to automate all aspects of software delivery, such as all types of testing (unit, functional, performance etc), deployments through multiple stages (Dev, Test, Staging, Prod), and IT Ops (infrastructure provisioning, security patching, etc). You can use Shippable to create event-driven workflows across these activities to achieve Continuous Delivery, and use Shippable native functionality or your tool of choice for each activity.

InfoQ: How does Shippable integrate with Jira?

Cavale:Customers can open or update Jira issues from within the Shippable UI to report bugs or milestone updates.

InfoQ: How does the Packet/Arm solution work with Kubernetes and containers?

Cavale:Customers can use Shippable to deploy containers to Kubernetes running on Arm machines on Packet Cloud.

InfoQ: How is the end user charged for this solution?

Cavale:Shippable is a freemium service, so users can get started for free with one parallel build by signing in at www.shippable.com. Paid plans are for customers who want to run parallel builds. We charge $25/month for each parallel build. For Arm, we have introduced a shared pool of machines where open source projects can run builds for free. Commercial projects will be charged at $25/month for each node. Shippable is also available as an on-premises Server, with plans starting at $20/month/user.

InfoQ: What's so special about Arm and when do people choose to use this over what alternatives?

Cavale:The Arm chipset is known for being highly energy efficient and small, and is therefore often the first choice in battery powered small devices, and also for embedded and system-on-a-chip (SoC). The Arm ecosystem is growing rapidly in a wide variety of markets such as mobile, data centre, IoT, AI, automotive, healthcare, smart home, and wearables.

InfoQ: Does Shippable integrate with any other tools in a DevOps toolchain and if so what?

Cavale:Yes, Shippable integrates with over eighty popular tools in the DevOps toolchain. Most notable among them are Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, Packer, Helm, Capistrano, testing platforms like Sauce Labs and Nouvola, all test frameworks, all major cloud providers like GCP, AWS, and Azure, all Git-based source control providers, artefact repositories, etc. We also integrate with Jenkins to help customers who want to keep using Jenkins for CI but want a more modern platform for Continuous Delivery.