Codeship, a startup with a cloud service for testing and deploying code, has completely revamped its tool, enabling developers to test multiple batches of code at once.
As a result, companies can run the latest versions of their software considerably quicker than before. Ultimately, that means development teams can be more productive -- and what company doesn't want that? The flip side: It's going to cost you.
"The more pipelines they use, the faster tests run, the faster they get to the results, the more they have to pay," Codeship cofounder and chief executive Mo Plassnig told VentureBeat in an interview.
And just as Codeship is coming out with a more expensive tier of service, named ParallelCI, it's also looking to pick up business at bigger companies, which presumably have more money hanging around to pay for such services. Codeship counts startups like Product Hunt and Treehouse as customers, but now it's also honing in on enterprises, too.
That's only natural, given the competitive nature of the market for web-based testing tools. Other startups in that space include CircleCI, Drone.io, Semaphore, and Shippable.
And competition is in fact on Plassnig's mind. That's why CircleCI can test code in parallel rather than in sequence, he said.
"Our biggest customers more and more thought about switching over because we didn't offer it, although our basic product was already really fast," Plassnig said. "At a certain point, where you have a lot of tests, you need that feature. We built it to make sure they stay with us."
What's more, the biggest public cloud infrastructure provider out there, Amazon Web Services, late last year announced a continuous-delivery service of its own, CodePipeline. Codeship, which started in 2011, has a lead on CodePipeline -- CodePipeline is still not available to use. And on top of that, CodePipeline might not be the best choice for companies seeking to deploy applications onto multiple clouds, not just Amazon.
"It makes a lot of sense to have an independent company in the middle," Plassnig said.
Even so, Amazon is a major entity that can and does frequently drive costs down -- so it's critical for Codeship to keep improving its service. And that's what it's done.
Codeship, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced a $2.6 million funding round last year.