XebiaLabs

1. Summary

How to read this report

The Vendor profile is part of a series of documents aimed at giving the reader the tools to better understand a technology, evaluate it, and explore the market to find the best solutions for their organization.

In this context, and to get a complete view of the state of the solutions available in the market, the reader should consider the following documents:

• Key Criteria is an introduction to the technology, defines the necessary evaluation metrics, the key criteria to evaluate new solutions, and the impact of the latter on the former. It is dedicated to those end users that are approaching a new technology for the first time or want an update on the latest evolution.
• Vendor Profile covers a single vendor regarding the solutions described in the other reports. It provides more details on the solution, how the vendor approached the key criteria, and the impact that its solution has on the evaluation metrics. This document helps end-users to get a quick but complete evaluation of a single vendor.

Please refer to GigaOM’s Key Criteria for CI/CD report to get a complete description of the key criteria and evaluation metrics referenced in this report.

XebiaLabs offers an end-to-end management solution that is toolchain and platform agnostic, nonetheless supporting best practice adoption. Note that the company is now in the process of merging with CollabNet VersionOne.

Market Positioning:

The XebiaLabs toolset very much fits the end-to-end ethos that we espouse in our report about CI/CD evolution. It does not offer a ‘complete’ solution per se, as it offers an unapologetically agnostic management and control layer – the provider has set its stall around connecting as broad as possible a range of DevOps tools, and deploying to a similarly diverse set of environments, from legacy to Kubernetes. The former it accomplishes through APIs, and the latter via an as-code approach which pervades every aspect of the XebiaLabs solution.

XebiaLabs very much targets the needs of organizations looking to scale their efforts or deal with complexity: to be fair, simpler environments may well be comfortable still with core solutions or do-it-yourself toolchains, as they will not have had to carry the burdens and costs of maintaining more complicated set-ups (which drain valuable engineer time and resources). In the same vein, it offers pipeline level visibility to deliver on the decision-making needs of managers and a broader range of stakeholders.

A more recent addition to the XebiaLabs solution set is the notion of ‘patterns,’ i.e. pipeline and deployment templates which can be shared between and across teams. The vendor is growing its (customizable) library of best practice patterns, making it increasingly able to guide development organizations in methods of how to create and deploy software efficiently and to fulfill quality criteria. We expect these capabilities to increase in importance in the future.

The XebiaLabs model is role-based, with permissions allocated to pipeline steps according to users or groups. So for example, ‘developer’ and ‘tester’ could be given overlapping, yet different deployment permissions.

Figure 1: XebiaLabs Enables Visibility Across Development & Deployment Stages