Many enterprise software hopefuls tackle the final stretch to becoming a mature offering through the development of an easy-to-use management GUI. This is especially true of DevOps and automation tools, as quite a few solutions have recently rounded out their platforms with web-based UI consoles for easier, visual management of resources and services.
For most DevOps-enabled organizations, however, a combination of different tools are required to fill out continuous delivery toolchain—as opposed to one monolithic solution. This makes a “single pane of glass” view of the whole DevOps pipeline difficult without developing a custom solution. So when Capital One needed a unified dashboard for all its tools, it set off to build its own open source DevOps dashboard called Hygieia.
Converging IT development and operations into DevOps have come a long way, and yet, the two should have grown together from the start.
That’s right, Capital One. At O’Reilly’s OSCON 2015 conference, the eighth largest bank and credit card issuer in the U.S. unveiled its internally-developed Hygieia to the open source world. The original impetus for the project was a lack of visibility across the development lifecycle, as Capital One engineering teams found that their tools only covered a portion of the pipeline like quality or environmental health. This marks the first time a large bank has released an open source software product and purportedly will not be the last, as Capital One promises more open source products coming down the pipeline.
Hygieia gives developers a visual way to track progress across the development pipeline. The dashboard automatically refreshes every minute after tracking a project’s progress across 6 areas: features, code repo, build, quality, monitoring, and deployment. So for example, the code repo widget displays information regarding coding activities, commits per day, number of committers, and the current coding trend.
As of now, the Hygieia dashboard only supports the following tools, though plugins can be written to integrate with other tools and solutions:
- Feature: Jira, VersionOne
- Code Repo: GitHub, Subversion
- Build: Jenkins, Hudson
- Quality: Sonar, Cucumber/Selenium
- Deploy: IBM UrbanCode Deploy
Though Capital One may be the first large bank to build and release its own open source software, it isn’t the first non-software tooling vendor to do so. For instance, both NetFlix and Walmart have developed specialized open source security tools for accommodating their own specific needs/requirements.
So does Capital One's Hygieia get a clean bill of health? In all fairness, it’s a competent solution from a non-software solution vendor. And though rudimentary in its current form, the open source tool will no doubt increase in sophistication and capabilities as the community sees fit. If anything, Hygieia attempts to unify significantly different DevOps tools into one visual interface for garnering holistic insight—a worthy cause in and of itself.
Similarly, UpGuard believes you should use the tools best suited for the job. Our unified integrity platform can monitor and validate all the tools in the DevOps pipeline, as well as provide the ability to maintain consistency throughout the continuous delivery process.
Sources
https://thenewstack.io/capital-one-out-to-display-its-geekdom-with-open-source-devops-dashboard/
http://press.capitalone.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251626&p=irol-headline1
