Bitrise, a provider of a DevOps platform for building mobile applications, plans to invest $3 million to create data centers in the European Union (EU) that meet sovereign cloud requirements.
Company CEO Barnabás Birmacher said Bitrise has spent much of the past year integrating its stack and consolidating the infrastructure it needs to support its platform in the U.S. Now, Bitrise is taking the next step toward ensuring that any data used to build a mobile application doesn’t leave the EU at a time when many organizations are either voluntarily deciding to depend less on IT infrastructure in the U.S. or are being required to use IT infrastructure in a specific geographic region.
To satisfy those requirements, Bitrise is acquiring the server and storage infrastructure it requires, which is then housed in a data center facility in Amsterdam that is owned by a third-party provider. That approach ensures that at any point necessary those servers and storage systems can be moved to another data center, noted Birmacher.
Regardless of location, the data centers will be based on the same Apple M4 and Linux-based infrastructure that Bitrise has built a DevOps platform on top of to streamline the building and deployment of mobile applications.
It’s not clear how fragmented software engineering is about to become as teams are required to ensure that application development projects only access data located in specific regions. Many DevOps teams have been relying on software-as-a-service (SaaS) application platforms that are designed to scale out across multiple geographic regions as additional compute resources have been needed. With the rise of sovereign cloud requirements, however, providers of those platforms need to ensure that any data being accessed never leaves a specific region.
That issue can be especially challenging for organizations that may have relied on highly distributed teams of developers that may reside in multiple countries.
In fact, one of the reasons more organizations are relying on the managed DevOps services that Bitrise provides is to help minimize that complexity, said Birmacher.
As the pace of mobile application development continues to accelerate, more organizations are looking to rely on managed DevOps services, added Birmacher. They simply can’t afford to not only only build a DevOps platform, but also maintain, update and secure it, he noted. That’s especially the case when it comes to building mobile applications simply because there isn’t a lot of forgiveness when it comes to, for example, having to rollback an application once it’s been made available in an app store, so ensuring that every test has been properly conducted is crucial, said Birmacher.
Regardless of who actually manages a DevOps environment, the need to continuously update mobile applications created additional challenges. End users expect that new features and capabilities will be added at a regular cadence. The number of organizations that can afford to invest in their own DevOps environment, as a percentage of those building mobile applications, remains comparatively small. So for the bulk of them, the only way to ensure best software engineering practices are being consistently followed is, after all, to rely on a service.
