Today, we’re excited to announce the release of both Garden 0.12, the latest version of open source Garden Core, and Garden Enterprise, a new product built around the open core.
These are meaningful milestones for the company, and there’s more we’d like to say about both releases. So let’s get right to it.
Introducing Garden Enterprise
Over the past year, we’ve had a lot of conversations with users so that we can better understand what they’re building with Garden and why it’s valuable to them. It didn’t take long for a pattern to emerge.
Above all else, Garden makes it possible to properly test and troubleshoot distributed, cloud native applications.
To some extent, this wasn’t surprising to us. We’ve treated tests as first-class citizens in Garden from the beginning because we believe that testing is a critical, yet often overlooked, part of the cloud native development process.
But we didn’t fully appreciate just how painful it had been for our users to integration test and QA and carry out code reviews before they’d started using Garden. We decided that this was a set of capabilities worth investing more in.
And that brings us to Garden Enterprise.
Building upon the open source Garden Core, Garden Enterprise makes it possible to quickly and securely provide on-demand, production-like testing environments for teams.
Beyond what’s available in Garden Core, Garden Enterprise provides secrets management, centralized environment management, direct integration with VCS, and critical security features (such as RBAC and SSO), all managed via a simple and intuitive UI.
We’re in the process of rolling out Garden Enterprise to our first customers, and for the next few months, we’ll be running a limited early access program to collect feedback and work closely with users to understand how the product and documentation can be improved.
If you think that Garden Enterprise might be a good fit for you, please get in touch!
The pricing page on the Garden website breaks down the difference between the open source Garden Core and Garden Enterprise in case you’d like to learn more about the two editions.
As you might have noticed, for the sake of clarity, we’ll now refer to our existing open source product as Garden Core and our new enterprise offering as Garden Enterprise.
It’s also important to note that Garden Core will remain central to our future work and that Garden Enterprise is a layer on top, as opposed to a commercial fork or a replacement. We remain fully committed to open source, and will keep improving and adding new features to the open core.
Garden 0.12 Release
As we’ve been building Garden Enterprise, we’ve also been making steady progress with Garden Core. Here are a couple of highlights from the Garden 0.12 release.
Workflows: Workflows make it possible to define and run a continuous sequence made up of both Garden commands and custom scripts, such as how to connect to infrastructure before a deploy or what steps should be taken after a build is finished. Using workflows, you can run the same sequence of steps locally and in CI, making integration tests easy to run consistently both pre- and post-commit.
Workflows are also central to Garden Enterprise, where a workflow can be triggered directly by GitHub/GitLab events like pushing and updating PRs.
Faster startup: Improved caching in Garden 0.12 makes successive invocations of Garden much faster.
More powerful templating: We’ve made a few improvements to our templating, including nested lookup expressions, which allow you to look up variables by the result of another template string.
We’ve also made a number of smaller improvements and fixes. Full release notes are available here.
To get started with Garden 0.12, head on over to our docs.
A New Look For Garden.io
To make sure our website reflects what Garden does best, we completed a pretty comprehensive rework of garden.io from both a content and design perspective.
If you’ve been with us for a while, the new website and messaging might look pretty different from what you’re used to. And that’s a fair point—we have made quite a lot of progress in how we articulate Garden’s benefits and what makes it different from other tools and frameworks.
Our roadmap and vision, however, haven’t changed much at all. We’re just sharpening our focus and evolving our messaging in response to feedback from our current and prospective customers.
We hope you like it, and if you have any feedback, please share!
p.s. I’d like to send a huge thank you and acknowledgement to the Garden team for all the hard work over the last months. It’s been an absolute delight, and doubly impressive considering the unusual circumstances. Especially the parents on the team—I can only imagine how much work this has been for you ❤
