SANTA FE, N.M., Dec. 8, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — DeployHub, creators of the first microservice management platform, today announced that Ortelius, the DeployHub open source core, has been accepted into the CD Foundation as an incubating project.

The mission of the Ortelius open source project is to simplify the adoption of modern architecture through a world-class microservice management platform driven by a supportive and diverse global open source community. Ortelius is the core of DeployHub Pro and allows DevOps teams to visualize the ‘logical’ application versions in a microservice architecture. Ortelius catalogs, versions and tracks microservices across clusters and supports continuous delivery by adding automated configuration management to the pipeline.

“We welcome Ortelius to the CD Foundation to help improve microservice adoption and implementation of better development practices,” said Tracy Miranda, Continuous Delivery Foundation Executive Director.

“In order to achieve success in microservices, organizations will need to manage them, or face the danger of microservice sprawl and complexity. Ortelius serves as a platform for microservice management,” explains Steve Taylor, Ortelius Architect and CTO of DeployHub.

“Microservices don’t need to be overly complex. The secret is in tracking their usage, versions and where they are running. The Ortelius team is dedicated to delivering a world class microservice management platform that simplifies the use and sharing of microservices,” Tracy Ragan, Executive Director, Ortelius Open Source Project.

“Love microservices but stressed about managing them. Ortelius is here to make microservices fun again,” Karamjot Singh, Developer, Ortelius community member.

“Ortelius will do for microservices what the Dewy decimal system did for library books,” Sacha Wharton, Ortelius community member.

“Collaboration in a cross-functional distributed environment must become more streamlined with microservices versions and dependencies outlined in clear fashion,” Tatiana Lazebnyk, Product Manager, Ortelius community member.

“Microservice are more than an architecture, it’s a mindset which essentially represents a paradigm shift and a natural progression of DevOps. The Ortelius team brings a platform that is driven by Global leaders helping in the mindset change thus supporting your DevOps transformation journey,” Siddharth Pareek, Global DevOps CoE Practice Lead, Natwest Group.

DeployHub
Moving to microservices breaks the way we assemble and configure software. DeployHub puts it back together by providing a central ‘hub’ for cataloging, versioning, sharing and releasing microservices across the organization. DeployHub empowers your high performing software engineers to easily move from monolithic to microservices.

the CD Foundation
The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) serves as the vendor-neutral home of many of the fastest-growing projects for continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). It fosters vendor-neutral collaboration between the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors to further CI/CD best practices and industry specifications. Its mission is to grow and sustain projects that are part of the broad and growing continuous delivery ecosystem.

Originally developed by DeployHub, Ortelius was created to provide a means to automate configuration at the application level. It also provides a central catalog of services that makes it easier to consume and deploy services across clusters that also tracks application versions and dependencies as updates to services are made.

DeployHub CEO Tracy Ragan said Ortelius is now being donated to the CD Foundation, an arm of the Linux Foundation, which is working to create de facto continuous delivery standards. As such, Ortelius will benefit from contributions from other members of the consortium that includes Google, CloudBees, CircleCI, JFrog, IBM, GitLab, Netflix and DeployHub.

The core CF Foundation projects are the open source Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform; Jenkins X, an open source CI/CD solution on Kubernetes; Spinnaker, an open source CD platform; and the Tekton specification for building CI/CD components.

Ortelius already integrates with CD orchestration tools and deployment tools such as Helm, Ansible and Spinnaker. The opportunity now is to address the entire application development life cycle of cloud-native applications using a GitOps methodology, said Ragan.

While in theory the rise of Kubernetes should make it easier to automate CD processes across multiple platforms, Ragan noted that in practice there are still substantial differences between instances of Kubernetes that will require tools to automate the rollout of microservices across multiple clusters. Ortelius allows IT teams to logically manage groups for microservices as a single entity in much the same way IT teams manage monolithic applications as a single entity, she said.

Ragan also noted that not all microservices are of equal value, so different approaches to managing them are required based on the number of dependencies they have and the value of the microservices to the business. As it becomes apparent IT teams will soon be managing perhaps thousands of microservices, the need for a standard approach that integrates with multiple CD platforms becomes more acute. In fact, she said, IT teams are approaching a new era when chaos engineering principles will need to be applied to the management of microservices.

Longer-term, Ragan said Ortelius will also make it feasible to employ machine learning algorithms to provide predictive analytics that can be used to optimize the microservices environment. That capability eventually will provide a critical capability for managing microservices at scale. It may also serve to further the adoption of best CD practices that thus far have proven elusive to achieve in IT environments where each platform has unique attributes that make automating application delivery challenging regardless of what type of application is involved.

In the meantime, IT organizations are being invited to contribute to the Ortelius project, now that it’s part of the CD Foundation. The more contributions that are made, the sooner the Ortelius platform graduates, which can’t come soon enough for many organizations that have already invested in microservices.