2nd Watch Launches Automation Frameworks for DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure

2nd Watch announces two new services for cloud automation: the 2nd Watch Modern CI/CD Pipeline and the 2nd Watch Machine Image Factory. Both services automate core functions of DevOps style software development and cloud infrastructure management, saving companies money and time. Companies can deploy the services on AWS, Azure or multi-cloud infrastructure, leveraging technologies specific to those environments.

The 2nd Watch Modern CI/CD Pipeline helps companies automate and accelerate application code development and save up to 75 percent on traditional implementation costs. Continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) is a key piece in the DevOps lifecycle, consisting of tools which automate the release of software throughout the entire development and QA cycle. Typically, companies create these pipelines in-house by weaving together multiple tools. Now, development teams can automate that step and leverage 2nd Watch’s standard pipeline framework, which can be easily replicated for each project. By using a previously deployed and trusted pattern, this cloud native solution brings confidence to an otherwise highly complex undertaking, which can be inconsistent. The Modern CI/CD Pipeline leverages Packer, Ansible and Terraform with options for Chef or Puppet, or 2nd Watch can customize the pipeline as needed for unique requirements.

The 2nd Watch Machine Image Factory reduces the time to deploy an updated, patched and hardened custom machine image by 75 to 95 percent. There is significant time and risk involved in manually creating and deploying virtual machine images in the cloud. Traditionally, multiple resources are required to access systems in order to perform application installs and other configurations. With the 2nd Watch Machine Image Factory, companies can avoid manual configurations by using a proven framework to automate the image creation process, leveraging Packer, Ansible and Terraform with options for Chef, Puppet or AWS CloudFormation. This streamlines the process of creating new resources in the cloud, improving security and performance. In this model, systems are simply replaced when updated applications and patches are available, avoiding the traditional long-term support of resources.

"A clearly-defined, standard CI/CD pipeline can help to simplify the creation and management of DevOps infrastructure and process, which remains a struggle for many companies," says Jay Lyman, principal analyst with 451 Research. "An established framework that helps automate the image creation process is also critical to immutable infrastructure that supports replacing components rather than changing them and restoring services in an outage by replacing them."

"We developed these frameworks to help customers accelerate their business transformation, while decreasing costs and speeding up time-to-market for new products and services," says Chris Garvey, EVP of Product at 2nd Watch. "These offerings will significantly reduce risk and provide a standardized set of frameworks, so developers can focus on innovation and customer experiences, not processes."