Container-centric developer automation platform Wercker BV today announced the release of Wercker Workflows, management solution for custom Docker container pipelines supporting distributed applications and microservices. Earlier this year, Wercker raised $4.5 million USD in a Series A funding round for a total of $7.5 million USD being put towards the development of this sort of container-based DevOps solution.

For DevOps teams, automation of the lifecycle for applications built through containers can become complex due to demands of orchestration and deployment. Wercker Workflows acts as a custom pipeline that automates deployment by using hooks via Git, a popular code repository, sources or other pipelines.

With Workflows developers gain intimate control over how the automation proceeds, which provides pathways for handling multi-environment complexity. With triggers leading to each particular pipeline the developer is able to automate any unique mix of build or push commands depending on the environment and other configuration factors.

Workflows allows for simple and complex pipelines by allowing pipelines to trigger other pipelines either sequentially or in parallel. This paradigm also allows for connectivity to wide scale orchestration platforms and schedulers such as DC/OS Marathon (from Mesosphere, Inc.) and Kubernetes (from Cloud Native Computing Foundation).

“When it comes to container operations, both Mesosphere and Wercker aim to make automation scale without an added layer of complexity,” said Aaron Bell, product manager at Mesosphere. “We’re excited to see Wercker integrate with Marathon to enable the community to easily deploy containers to hyperscale datacenters powered by DC/OS.”

“Both Kubernetes and Wercker strive to make containers simple and powerful,” said David Aronchick, senior product manager of Kubernetes.

For testing and discovery, Workflows allows DevOps teams to checkpoint pipelines to isolate issues; for example, a pipeline step that takes longer than expected can be split out into its own Workflow. By putting it into its own Workflow and pipeline it is possible to re-run just that part of the build process (and potentially discover the problem while watching).

The Wercker Workflows solution works with with Amazon Web Services (AWS), CoreOS, Deis, Kubernetes and DC/OS—all of which are well known DevOps automation, infrastructure and cloud platforms used by business and enterprise application development teams.

In depth tutorials are available on the Wercker Workflows web page for deployment on Amazon EC2 Container Registry (Amazon ECR) or Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS), CoreOS, Deis, Kubernetes and DC/OS.

Featured image credit: via Pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/shipping-containers-cargo-port-1096829/