Looking Back: A Big 2023 for Release

When the holidays approach and a new year looms on the horizon, I always find myself looking back at what happened over the past 12 months. Reflecting on what the Release team achieved this year, especially in expanding ephemeral environment automation to more developers and use cases, is truly remarkable. Here are some of the highlights from 2023.

‍What’s in a Name

Changing the company’s name from ReleaseHub to Release was a significant milestone for us. This name more accurately reflects our vision and our mission from the inception to help people release their ideas to the world faster. It aligns well with the expanded use cases, capabilities, and technologies our development team has added to the product.

Bigger and Better Data for Every Developer

After the renaming, the next major release delivered improvements to Release Instant Datasets. Conversations with customers consistently underscored the importance of data to effective development and test processes and the complexity of managing massive data in the SDLC. Release Instant Datasets 2.0 made production-like data for developers even more powerful, with improvements to both the workflow and architecture of the tool. (CTO Erik Landerholm goes into the details of these changes in this blog post). Shortly after, we made Instant Datasets available as a standalone product, enabling everyone to take advantage of data automation whether or not they are using the entire Release platform. 

Docker Desktop Extension

Instant Datasets became a crucial component of Release’s support across the software development life cycle. Another major piece of the SDLC puzzle was the launch of Release Share as a Docker Desktop extension. Release Share provides fast simple container sharing to the millions of Docker developers directly from the Docker Desktop application. Shifting environment sharing left to the start of the development process means app delivery teams can create a self-serve version of their app for feedback and testing at every stage of the process.

More Integrations for More Choice

Docker is just one part of a developer’s toolbox we support at Release. Developers ask us all the time “Does Release work with my [insert favorite tool name]?” We’re proud to have a broad set of partnerships and integrations with the tools and platforms favored by cloud-native app teams. Notably, we’ve improved our integration with Tonic.ai for data automation and anonymization,  developed new integrations with GitLab for more repo choices, and expanded our relationships with AWS and GCP. We’re excited about many significant new integrations coming in early 2024.

The Year of AI 

And finally, no discussion of the last 12 months would be complete without talking about AI. ChatGPT and OpenAI are having a huge impact on the world, and the Release team has been creating innovative ways to use it to help make Release more powerful, and more importantly, make AI and dataset training more accessible to developers and teams. We launched release.ai as our hub for all things AI for DevOps. Today Release users can use interactive prompts with Release to “talk to your infrastructure” and get insights into their environments.  We are also helping companies apply ephemeral environment automation to dataset training and production workloads to make dataset training and optimization more efficient and accessible to more companies. 

Thank you to our team, our partners, and most importantly our Release community for your collaboration, feedback, and suggestions throughout this year. It's been a wild year for all of us, with a lot of highs, lows, and challenges personally and professionally. It's gratifying and humbling to interact with this awesome community, whether on Slack, at industry events, or Zoom discussions. Here’s to a peaceful and prosperous 2024!