D2iQ polishes Dispatch platform for CI/CD newbies while Google reportedly in talks to inhale cloud service firm

D2iQ polishes Dispatch platform for CI/CD newbies while Google reportedly in talks to inhale cloud service firm

The company formerly known as Mesosphere has smoothed off the edges from its recently pushed out CI/CD platform Dispatch, in the hopes v1.1 will be easier to get into and quicker to operate to secure D2iQ a slice of the growing CI/CD market.

To help with that and make the platform more attractive to newbies, D2iQ has added some step-by-step tutorials and worked on improving the Dispatch documentation as a whole. There’s now also a Dispatch dashboard in the UI, which, for example, includes PipelineRuns and should make it easier to stay on top of CI/CD processes planned with the tool.

CLI lovers will get their status information either via dispatch ci list pipelineruns or dispatch ci list tasks –pipelinerun=<name>. Should a task fail, Dispatch preserves artifacts generated in the process in the new version. Those can then be listed and fetched through two new commands, while single steps of a pipeline produce variables for consumption in consequent tasks. 

The platform team also made some progress in terms of security, with the CLI now offering private repository authentication, for example. Other enhancements that follow that trajectory are an option to skip TLS verification for self-signed certificates, a gitops cert command and additional options in gitops creds for managing TLS certificates and SSH known hosts. 

Features like MinIO scaling and high availability have also been added and could help those already on D2iQ products to switch to the service. After all, there doesn’t seem to be a lack of alternatives right now, with more and more companies trying to offer an end-to-end experience instead of singular services when it comes to app management.

When the platform went live last month, the variety of supported domain specific languages was strongly highlighted. The 1.1 release strengthens Dispatch’s capabilities for users programming in the Python dialect Starlark. Amongst other things, it allows the use of lambdas and nested function definitions in pipeline code, and provides ways to import code via the Starlark frontend.

Standard Starlark libraries can now be downloaded through what is called Dispatch Catalog and integrated into a pipeline. The catalog is a still somewhat quiet repository of resources which aims at speeding up the process of adding tasks such as testing and artifact management to a workflow. It is marked experimental at this point and only hosts Starlark libraries. D2iQ, however, promises that it will “grow to include other resources and languages”.

Those who have used Dispatch before will have to be sure to specify –task when using dispatch ci run, otherwise the command won’t work. For remote runs, –service-account needs to be defined now, since the platform doesn’t default to build-bot any longer.

If reports are true, Google – whose parent firm Alphabet is scheduled to announce its Q1 earnings tonight – is in the background as all this work is done, seemingly interested in chatting about the possibility of acquiring the cloud services firm and its platform. D2iQ is a Google Cloud Platform and G Suite “partner” and moved its focus towards Kubernetes, a Google-bred project, last year.