Source: globenewswire.com (original announcement, July 2018)
Partnership Overview
Agile Stacks announced its entry into the CloudBees Elevate Partner Program, a channel initiative designed to extend CloudBees’ enterprise DevOps capabilities through complementary technology and services partners. The partnership pairs CloudBees’ enterprise-grade continuous delivery platform — built on Jenkins — with Agile Stacks’ GitOps automation service, which is aimed at dramatically reducing the time and cost required to stand up production-ready DevOps environments in the cloud.
What Each Company Brings to the Table
CloudBees: Enterprise Jenkins and Continuous Delivery
CloudBees is built on top of Jenkins, one of the most widely used open-source automation servers in the DevOps ecosystem. CloudBees adds enterprise-critical capabilities on top of the upstream Jenkins project:
- Security and compliance controls for regulated industries
- Scalability to support large numbers of development teams and concurrent builds
- Centralized management of Jenkins masters across an organization
- Expert support backed by a dedicated customer success team
CloudBees also supports running Jenkins workloads on Kubernetes, enabling dynamic, containerized build agents that scale on demand — a critical requirement for organizations with variable CI/CD workloads.
Agile Stacks: GitOps Automation and DevOps Cloud Stacks
Agile Stacks describes its platform as a “non-opinionated” GitOps automation service — meaning it does not lock customers into a specific toolchain. Instead, it provides a framework for deploying full-function DevOps cloud stacks composed of pre-tested, integrated open-source tools. Key claims from the company include:
- Deployment of complete DevOps stacks within minutes, compared to typical enterprise rollout timelines that can stretch from six months to two years
- Application Templates that automatically create CI/CD pipelines binding development, test, and production environments to stacks
- A DevOps-first architecture delivered out of the box, reducing the custom integration work traditionally required
How the Integration Works
The combined offering targets enterprise teams that want to run CloudBees Jenkins at scale on Kubernetes without spending months on infrastructure setup. The integration works as follows:
- An organization uses Agile Stacks Application Templates to provision a full DevOps cloud stack — including networking, storage, security, and tooling — on their chosen cloud provider.
- CloudBees Jenkins is included within that stack, pre-configured with enterprise-grade settings rather than requiring manual setup.
- Pipeline configuration is automated by Agile Stacks, linking source repositories, build environments, and deployment targets without requiring hand-crafted Jenkinsfiles from scratch.
- Teams can scale builds horizontally across Kubernetes worker nodes, using the elastic compute capacity of their cloud provider.
Business Goals of the Partnership
Beyond the technical integration, the partnership involves joint go-to-market activities:
- Joint sales motions targeting enterprise accounts looking to accelerate DevOps adoption
- Co-marketing initiatives focused on educating organizations about GitOps practices and cloud resource management
- A shared emphasis on reducing operational expenditure by automating infrastructure provisioning and pipeline management
Industry Context: Why This Partnership Matters
By 2018, Kubernetes had become the dominant container orchestration platform, but running stateful enterprise tools like Jenkins reliably on Kubernetes remained a significant operational challenge for many teams. Separately, GitOps — the practice of using Git as the single source of truth for infrastructure and application state — was gaining traction as a way to apply software engineering discipline to infrastructure management.
Partnerships like this one reflected an emerging pattern: specialist automation vendors wrapping and extending core DevOps platforms (Jenkins, in this case) to lower the barrier of entry for enterprises that lacked the in-house expertise to build and maintain complex CI/CD infrastructure from scratch.
Quotes from Both Companies
“We empower enterprises in today’s global digital economy to innovate and adapt rapidly using our Agile Stacks automated agile software delivery service, which significantly streamlines the deployment and update management of the many tools they rely on. We are excited to partner with CloudBees in delivering enterprise Jenkins, the DevOps and continuous delivery solution of choice for many enterprises, with our service.”
— John Morada, Vice President of Global Business Development, Agile Stacks
“We pride ourselves on providing enterprise-grade continuous delivery functionality to DevOps teams and then complementing that with companies, such as Agile Stacks, to enable the success of non-opinionated enterprise-grade open source technologies. Working together, we are addressing our customers’ growing demand to run our platform on Kubernetes, while cost-effectively providing the security and compliance, flexibility, and scale capabilities they need to drive their businesses.”
— Aaron Morrison, Director of Worldwide Channel Sales, CloudBees
About Agile Stacks
Agile Stacks provides an all-in-one, non-opinionated GitOps automation service aimed at enterprises building cloud-native platforms. Its stacks incorporate pre-tested, integrated open-source tools that are ready to use from the moment they are deployed, targeting the performance, agility, and scalability requirements of modern digital businesses.