Huge Discounts on Cruise from Thoughtworks

ThoughtWorks Studios released version 1.3 of Cruise, their Continuous Integration product last week. You can get a huge discount on it via this blog. (keep reading for more detail)

  • They've added the ability to run multiple agents on your enormous old-school build server.
  • They've shortened the feedback loop with custom email notifications based on your criteria
  • You can now see the difference between two pipelines (they now create a new pipeline instance for each trigger)
  • Wildcard artifact uploads
  • Git submodules and branches support
  • Support for SUSE Linux
  • Ability to run cleanup tasks on agents when a stage is cancelled
  • Warnings on low disk space
  • Cruise Professional lets you group pipelines together and control who has view and operate access to these groups, as well as allowing multiple source control systems of different types within a single pipeline
  • I'll be doing a more formal review and perhaps a less formal interview with some of the ThoughtWorks Studios guys in London. In the meantime, how about a discount? When I visited ThoughtWorks recently I asked them what they would do for readers of the blog. I was expecting to get an offer of some swag to give away (every ThoughtWorks office has a stash of swag). I even asked for some copies of the ThoughtWorks Anthology to give away. But they came back with a 35% discount for Cruise Professional.

    If you want to get a huge discount on Cruise, you need to send an email to studios@thoughtworks.com with the promotional code TWSBD on the subject line. Do it now, because this promotion is limited to two weeks. You can download an evaluation copy of Cruise here. If you've contacted them with the promotional code, you'll be eligible to buy a copy of Cruise Professional at 35% off of list price - even after the two week period is over.

    I'm very happy to negotiate a deal for readers of this blog. Not every product will be a good fit for your organisation, and I'd rather shut this blog down than encourage people to buy software that wasn't helping them - we see too much bad software every day.

    Having said that, some of the features of Cruise are helpful. What I like is the artifact repository and the deployment pipeline. We all know that deployment to a test environment should be at the touch of a button. Cruise allows you to do this by tracking all the states through to production. If you buy Cruise Professional you can assign rights to the stages so that your PM can't kick off a production deployment. Useful.

    You can also test builds on multiple platforms, and dynamically distribute work across the build grid. In general I think the approach is pretty mature, and ThoughtWorks Studios are really gunning for the "last mile" of development - where investment in automation is rare, and can have a great return.

    Notes and conflicts of interest:

    • This offer is valid for two weeks (expires Wednesday July 29, 2009)
    • I used to work for ThoughtWorks
    • I was hired by some of the Studios people
    • I hired some other Studios peeps
    • They put me on their referral programme to get you this price. I will eventually get a small commission payment if you place an order.
    • More motivating would have been spending of Roy's air miles on a trip to Peet's Coffee for my better half and I. Oh well. Jez has promised me a Monmouth in August.


    DevOps New Zealand