Harness Inc., a well-funded developer productivity startup, today announced that it has acquired the assets of competitor Armory Inc.

TechCrunch reported that the all-cash deal is worth about $7 million. Armory previously raised more than $82 million in funding from Y Combinator, Insight Partners and other institutional investors.

“We view this acquisition as a testament to our commitment to the developer community and to simplifying and improving the developer experience,” said Harness founder and Chief Executive Jyoti Bansal (pictured).

Enterprise developers historically released new features for their software every few weeks or months. Today, some cloud applications are updated as frequently as several times a day. That accelerated release pace is made possible by a code management methodology known as CI/CD, or continuous integration and continuous deployment.

Harness provides a platform that makes it easier for developers to adopt CI/CD. Usually, implementing the methodology requires software teams to deploy a complex array of open-source tools, which can take a significant amount of time and effort. Harness’ platform provides prepackaged CI/CD features that it says are significantly easier to set up. 

A CI/CD workflow comprises two main steps. The first is continuous integration, which is the process of incorporating a newly developed software update into an application’s code base. The second step is continuous deployment, or the task of releasing the updated code to production.

Harness’ platform provides features for managing both steps. Armory, the startup it has acquired, sells a competing but more narrowly focused developer productivity tool. The tool is mainly designed to automate the second step of the CI/CD workflow, namely the continuous deployment process.

Ensuring a continuous deployment pipeline works reliably can be a complicated task. Developers must create scripts that scan new code for vulnerabilities, performance issues and other bugs before it’s deployed. Additionally, software teams require the ability to quickly roll back faulty code files if they somehow avoid detection and make it to production.

Armory’s platform promises to simplify the workflow. Using the software, developers can write a relatively simple script that specifies how continuous deployment should be carried out in a given application project. From there, Armory automatically creates a code deployment pipeline based on the script.

The platform also promises to ease several related tasks. According to Armory, it can scan newly created code files for known vulnerabilities before they’re released to production. Additionally, the platform includes features that ease the task of releasing software updates in Kubernetes environments.

Harness plans to continue supporting existing Armory customers’ deployments of the platform following today’s acquisition. The latter company counts Autodesk Inc., Informatica Corp. and other major tech firms as customers. Additionally, Harness will explore opportunities to integrate Armory’s technology into its CI/CD platform.

Photo: SiliconANGLE