There is a great quote by Marc Andreessen who said that “software is eating the world”. What Marc means by this is that software is defining every industry we know; we’re no longer buying records at our local retailer but stream them via Rdio or Spotify. Skype is now the largest telecommunications provider and we’re even talking about the software-defined data-center.

The cloud has become the defacto distribution mechanism for these software services, but has also allowed for disruptive change in how these services are delivered and consumed. Whereas it used to be the case that you would have to purchase a new version of your favorite word processing software at your local retailer, with the cloud, updates can be pushed out incrementally.

Introducing wercker

The key enabler for this new way of developing software is continuous delivery. Software is eating the world, and wercker makes it taste better.

There are several successful companies out there which are big proponents of continuous delivery such as Netflix and Etsy. It is wercker’s mission to democratize continuous delivery for every developer and was founded on this very same premise in the beginning of last year by me, Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, and my cofounder Wouter Mooij out of frustration with existing solutions.

This video introduces wercker and presents our vision on the product:

How it works

Wercker’s flow is simple; it integrates with popular version controls platforms such as Github and Bitbucket on one end and Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers and Platform clouds like Heroku on the other end.

We run any unit tests you might have included in your project and subsequently present the results on a comprehensive dashboard.

You are able to define different environments or deploy targets for, for instance staging or production to which you can deploy your project with a push of a button.

Software is better developed together so wercker also captures the social dynamics that are paired with continuous delivery. The activity feed showcases who in your team broke the build or deployed to which environment. This increases transparency and trust within your team.

Open Source

Apart from offering wercker for free to open source projects we are also in the process of opening up wercker’s build environments. These environments are similar to Heroku’s buildpacks, allowing developers to define not only their own programming stack that they would like to use on wercker, but also the various build and test steps that they want to run.

New languages and frameworks can be integrated with ease as we’ve built these environments upon Chef cookbooks which can subsequently be used for both provisioning and deployment as well. Cookbooks and recipes are already a very big open source movement, which we’re stimulating even more.

The Future

We’re very excited that we’ve raised a seed round led by Shamrock Ventures, Amsterdam-based MicroVC Vitulum Ventures and Greylock Partners. The funding will help us grow our platform and expand our operations.

If you are a developer, sign up for the beta at http://beta.wercker.com. We are also interested in hearing what programming stacks developers are leveraging for their applications and to which environments they are deploying.