Mailbag: DRUD Tech Launches ddev Community Open Source Toolkit

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Mailbag: DRUD Tech Launches ddev Community Open Source Toolkit

DRUD's ddev Community is an open source solution intended to automate a number of web development tasks that frustratingly takes too much time and resources to manually accomplish.

Logo of DRUD Technologies

Last week, I received an email inviting me to take a sneak peak at a press release that became public today. In the email, I was asked if I would be interested in hearing "news from new open source startup, DRUD Tech, founded by a couple of long-time Drupal contributors". According to the email, the company has been in "stealth mode" quietly working on their new product which is ready for launch this week. Given that I'm a long time fan of the Drupal content management system of course I said yes.

The new product is ddev (pronounced Dee-Dev) Community which is an open source solution intended to automate a number of web development tasks that frustratingly takes too much time and resources to manually accomplish. Having already mentioned Drupal, I should probably also mention that this toolkit is also intended for other CMSs including open source favorite WordPress. I've attached below a copy of the latest version of the press release I received. I also did a little digging around DRUD's website and found a video I placed under the press release which shows off some of the features in an earlier version of ddev.

DRUD Tech Releases ddev Community, the Premier Open Source Toolkit to Simplify End-to-End Web Development Processes

The new enterprise-grade, open source solution automates local web development processes to deliver unmatched cost and labor efficiencies

Denver, Colorado – September 19, 2017 – DRUD Tech, provider of open source development tools that automate workflows and web application development with popular CMSes including Drupal and WordPress, today announced the release of ddev Community. Web developers can download ddev Community today at https://github.com/drud.

ddev Community is designed to abstract away the complicated steps and disparate components of website development. Even designers who have never seen a command line can be deploying code within an hour by using ddev Community’s simple interface that manages many complex technologies, including industry standard components like MySQL, NGINX, and PHP by default with the ability to extend to include Redis, Apache Solr, memcache, Varnish, and more. For experienced development teams, ddev Community eliminates unnecessary delays, errors, and inefficiencies common throughout the current development to deployment and hosting lifecycle.

DRUD Tech, officially incorporated in January 2017, releases ddev Community as the first of several products in a suite of tools and services created to improve the end-to-end experience from web development to deployment and hosting. Formed by Drupal contributors after repeated exposure to – and frustration with – the considerable amount of overhead associated with setting up and maintaining the infrastructure, tooling, and workflows necessary to quickly and easily manage multiple websites, DRUD Tech provides the industry’s most comprehensive web development solution.

ddev Community delivers:

  • Cost-Savings: By streamlining development processes, ddev Community allows companies to reclaim 5-20% overhead of each developer’s work week that is spent researching, installing, upgrading, debugging, and maintaining their local development stack and deployments.
  • Tooling Consistency: In any website development and management setting, design and development resources operate differently based on skill, expertise, and favored programs. Using ddev Community, all resources perform the typical local environment management tasks the same way and with the same outcome, delivering a steep reduction in setup time, task switching, and reworking inefficiencies.
  • Task and Budget Estimating Efficiency: With ddev Community, the time it takes developers to complete tasks can be reduced by up to 20%, which enables greater clarity in predicting budgeting and delivery timeframes.
  • Test-Driven Reliability: Each commit to the ddev Community codebase kicks off a plethora of automated tests to ensure there are no breaks in existing functionality or operating system capability, and that changes in underlying technologies do not require changes to maintain functionality.
  • Pluggable Architecture: ddev Community was designed to be pluggable with a variety of hosting providers and platforms (notably Pantheon.io) to reduce time spent syncing code, databases, and files between environments.
  • Instant Developer Utility: By eliminating the need for developers to be experts across myriad technologies, ddev Community increases the ability of web developers and designers to deliver better quality and higher volume work, and allows quick developer onboarding and upleveling across all levels of technical experience.
  • Better, Faster Feedback Loops: ddev Community reduces time and labor costs associated with incorrect deliverables by improving feedback loops when integrated with continuous deployment to client-accessible environments.
  • Quick Installation and Upgrades: ddev Community can be installed and upgraded in minutes across all major operating systems.

“Web development teams are all-too-familiar with the hours lost due to slow setup, task-switching between projects, and lack of tooling consistency, whether it’s for a client website client or a project for an internal department,” said Steven Grandchamp, CEO, DRUD Tech. “Using DRUD Tech’s ddev Community, development teams can see an unmatched reduction in process and cost inefficiencies all while delivering a superior quality of work. ddev Community is a critical, must-have new solution for web development teams of all sizes to achieve nearly instant benefits through much more simplified and automated development processes.”

“Whether it’s for a small two- or three-person shop, a large agency, or an IT department responsible for thousands of websites, the result is better, faster, and less expensive development. At newmedia.com, the amount of time it takes web developers to either on-board or task-switch between client projects has been slashed by 80%. This significant reduction in the hours required to complete development work makes us more effective, and profitable,” said Steve Morris, CEO of digital agency newmedia.com, an early DRUD Tech user. "newmedia.com has seen enormous growth in the last 3 years, earning the rank of #1 web agency according to Clutch, UpCity and the Business Journal, and making the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies twice in a row, and we attribute much of that success to DRUD Tech's ddev Community. Thanks to DRUD Tech, we’re simultaneously delivering better work for our clients, and earning better margins for our agency.”

About DRUD Tech

Named as a wordplay on the developers’ acronym CRUD, DRUD Tech creates the industry’s only comprehensive, enterprise-grade, open source suite of infrastructure and development tools. DRUD Tech enables test-driven solutions spanning the entire web development life cycle - starting with local development and continuously deploying, staging, and testing changes on the way to production. DRUD Tech has raised $6.5 million from private investors and is based in Denver.