Convox, a startup seeking to simplify the deployment of applications on the Amazon Web Services public cloud, is launching today a new web service for automatically running new versions of applications as new code gets checked in on GitHub.
The new Grid service, which has free and paid tiers, can also integrate with companies’ Slack channels in order to send notifications about events. The tool can allow multiple team members to use application infrastructure.
The big story here is that Convox is becoming more useful at more stages of the journey of developing applications. It’s not just an easier way to host using an open-source tool — it’s now also a continuous delivery tool.
Why did Convox do this? For one thing, because people could use additional tools as they seek to deploy code on Convox’s open-source Rack platform as a service (PaaS) across different infrastructure for different stages of application development.
“Grid makes it easy to keep track of and manage multiple Racks. You can give the racks easy names like ‘production’ and ‘dev’ and then switch between them on the CLI [command line interface] with commands like ‘convox switch production’ instead of having to remember a hostname for the rack,” Convox cofounder Matt Manning told VentureBeat in an email.
Convox also has business reasons for releasing Grid: It’s a big step toward monetization. If you’re only working with public repos, then you may not have to pay anything for it each month. But if you want to use it with private repositories on GitHub, the service costs money.
The service will become more fleshed out in the future, with more integrations of third-party tools, including full-featured continuous-integration/continuous-delivery services, Manning said.
San Francisco-based Convox participated in the summer 2015 batch of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator.
A blog post on Convox Grid has more on the new feature.
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