A major goal for Zkybase is to tie together the activities of developers, testers, release engineers and operations. A few major benefits are:
- Tool integration: We can single source app lists and more across development, build, test, deployment, monitoring, knowledge management and other tools.
- Process streamlining: Outputs from the dev process feed into the test and deployment processes, which in turn feed into operational processes
- Communications across teams: All the teams work from the same concepts and data, facilitating communication.
One of the first things I want to tackle in Zkybase, then, is supporting some developer-centric concerns. An important one is source control. Obviously Zkybase isn’t itself a source control management system, but it makes sense to pull in useful information from the source code repos just to provide a “single pane of glass” where developers and other users can get a holistic view of what an app is all about.
Since I’m using GitHub, Github integration is a logical starting point for Zkybase/SCM integration. GitHub has a REST API that makes this integration easy. I wrote a blog post on Spring in Practice that explains the technical approach. Here’s the end result:
Zkybase SCM page
I suspect that such integrations will be a large part of the value that Zkybase delivers. They will help realize the process, tool and communications benefits I highlighted above.