GitKraken Adds Tools to Streamline DevOps Workflows

GitKraken today unfurled a suite of tools designed to make it simpler for developers to move between multiple application environments, including an offering that provides a command line interface (CLI) that enables deeper integration within DevOps workflows.

GitKraken CEO Matt Johnston said GitKraken CLI will enable DevOps teams to improve developer productivity by reducing the current level of friction many of them encounter as they switch between, for example, multiple cloud computing environments.

As part of that effort, the company is also making available GitKraken Browser Extension, which makes the suite of tools the company provides directly accessible from Chrome, Firefox and Edge browsers, with support for accessing GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps and Bitbucket built-in.

The company is also previewing GitKraken.dev, a cloud service through which it will foster collaboration among developers that use the company’s tools.

Finally, GitKraken is also committing to adding support for the IntelliJ integrated development environment (IDE) to GitLens early next year. GitLens is an open source extension to VS code the company currently provides to make it simpler to identify the specific developers that wrote a piece of code. The company claims there are now more than 25 million instances of GitLens installed.

GitKraken also already provides additional collaboration services, including Shared Workspaces, Cloud Patches, Focus Views and tools for surfacing insights based on the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics defined by Google. The company has also committed to investing in generative artificial intelligence (AI) to automate tasks such as generating and explaining commit messages.

While developer productivity has always been a concern, there is a lot more focus on the issue any time the economy becomes more turbulent, noted Johnston. Organizations of all sizes are now being required to do more with less, so many of them are now looking to provide developers with more time to write code versus managing application environments, he added.

Of course, providing developers with more time to write code doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a corresponding increase in productivity. The issue is that having more time to write code doesn’t always correlate directly to higher-quality code being developed. Streamlining workflows, however, does provide an opportunity for developers to spend more time writing code, noted Johnson. It also makes it simpler for developers to spin up development environments whenever inspiration happens to strike, he added.

Measuring developer productivity may never be an exact science, but it’s clear many organizations are now trying to strike a more nuanced DevOps balance to lighten the cognitive load developers today experience when building and deploying applications. The overall goal is to make it easier to hire and retain developers by making it simpler for them to focus on creating code rather than managing and securing IT infrastructure.

Each DevOps team will need to determine how best to achieve that goal, but after several years of attempting to shift more responsibility for managing the building and deployment of applications father left toward developers, it appears the pendulum is finally starting to swing back toward more nuanced approaches that promise to make developers more—rather than less—productive.