CloudBees buzzes a little louder with acquisition of feature flag firm Rollout

Rollout is an important part of CloudBees' software delivery management plans, says CEO Labourey

CloudBees, the enterprise CI/CD provider, has announced that it is acquiring Rollout, a provider of ‘feature flag' software that decouples feature deployment from code release. This allows development teams to decide exactly when to expose a particular feature to users as well as giving them more fine-grained controls, the company claims.

For CloudBees, Rollout is the latest in a series of acquisitions in recent months that include CI/CD firm Codeship in 2108 and pipeline automation vendor Electric Cloud in April 2019 as it seeks to be a dominant force in automated software delivery. The company is also the founding member of the CI/CD Foundation, which was launched in March. CloudBees has raised a total of $121.2 million in funding from investors, the latest round being in June 2018.

Feature flagging allows developers switch certain features on or off in the development pipleline, making it ideal for A/B testing of minimum viable product (MVP) releases. According to CloudBees CEO, Sacha Labourey, many development teams currently achieve this division manually, by creating more branches.

"Doing feature flagging manually can be both time consuming and hard as the features and their complexities grow," he said.

"An out-of-the-box solution alleviates that pain and allows developers and teams to focus back on coding the features and experimenting with how they work faster and more seamlessly."

While there are other feature flagging tools on the market, including Launch Darkly and Split, Labourey said that Rollout has built up strengths in security and usability.

"Rollout differentiates itself by being developer-friendly [with] excellent SDKs, as well as having a user-friendly GUI - most have just one of the other," said Labourey.

"Launch Darkly and Split solely cover the feature management space alone whereas CloudBees see Rollout as an important part in a much larger story around software delivery management (SDM)."

Rollout will remain as a standalone product, but it will also become closely integrated with and within other CloudBees products, Labourey said, adding: "There are no immediate changes to the pricing model but we are working on options for bundling Rollout with other CloudBees subscriptions."

Erez Rusovsky, CEO and co-founder of Rollout, will join CloudBees as product director for Rollout.

"Rollout joining forces with CloudBees is genuinely the case where one plus one equals three. Feature flags and CI/CD combined help companies truly become continuous and increase the pace of innovation," Rusovsky said in a statement.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

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