March 2022 Summaries

There's a running joke in the developer community that the physical supply chain is far more efficient than the software supply chain, with software supply chains growing in size and complexity as computing moves to the cloud. Devops engineers are under pressure to automate them without breaking through the bottleneck. The company Dagger aims to solve this problem by providing a standardized set of building blocks for devops engineers to assemble any way they want, knowing that the result will run reliably on any cloud. Dagger has launched its public beta version and secured a $20 million Series A investment led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from other prominent investors. The company is now valued at $30 million after adding another major investor, Erica Brescia at Redpoint, to its board.

Dagger` is a new project introduced by the creators of Docker, aiming to revolutionize the CI/CD pipeline development experience for devops engineers. It allows them to build powerful pipelines quickly and run them anywhere, without the need for specialized tools or scripts. Dagger achieves this through its "lego system" approach, where pipelines are composed of reusable actions using an intuitive declarative language and API. This enables devops engineers to test, debug, and improve their pipelines locally, then run them on any CI system with minimal modification. By introducing a portable devkit for CI/CD pipelines, Dagger aims to unify dev and CI environments, avoid CI lock-in, and promote component reuse between pipelines, ultimately helping the devops community solve its fragmentation problem.

Today, the Dagger project is introducing its 0.2 release, codenamed Europa, which marks a significant improvement in developer experience. The new release features a redesigned CLI and powerful new APIs that enable more productive and portable CI/CD pipeline development. A key innovation is the introduction of the "Plan" concept, which simplifies pipeline setup and configuration to a single step. This allows developers to control every aspect of their pipelines declaratively, making it easier to integrate with declarative patterns such as gitops. The release also introduces the Action API, which enables lego-like composition of complex automations using standardized primitives. Additionally, the new release includes improvements to the Client API and Secrets API, providing seamless integrations with client machines and secure handling of secrets. The Dagger project is community-driven, and anyone can contribute to its development.