Mend.io Launches Mend Renovate Enterprise Edition
Mend Renovate is the industry leader in dependency management, downloaded more than a billion times — including by most of the top 10 tech giants — to help keep their applications safe and up to date. Its primary job is to scan your application software looking for external dependencies, and if newer versions are available, it will suggest code changes to upgrade you to the latest.
For many years Renovate has been provided free of charge by Mend.io, with support available from the open-source community. All free versions of Renovate are limited to running against one repository at a time. While this is often suitable for most small to medium development environments, when companies have thousands of repositories developers can find themselves waiting a long time for Renovate to run against their code. As such, large enterprises have been looking for better performance and more reliable support options.
Now, Mend Renovate Enterprise Edition solves the problem, offering dedicated support and unlimited scaling of server resources. Finally, organizations have the ability to process large numbers of repositories in a short amount of time, while taking comfort in the peace-of-mind provided by dedicated Mend.io support. The Enterprise Edition also comes with premium features that are not available in the free versions.
Features and Capabilities
Renovate Enterprise Edition and Renovate Community Edition are both self-hosted applications that run Renovate against your organization’s code repositories. Renovate Enterprise comes with unlimited processing capabilities, advanced features, and dedicated support from Mend.io. Let’s look at the main features in detail.
Runs Renovate!
First and foremost, Renovate Enterprise runs Renovate — the world’s premium dependency management software, which automatically creates pull requests to update your code to use the latest versions of external dependencies. Renovate Enterprise ships with the latest stable version of the open-source Renovate CLI, thus ensuring that new Renovate features are constantly being delivered to Renovate Enterprise.
Self-hosted Application
Renovate Enterprise is a self-hosted application, meaning organizations can keep everything on their own premises and have full control over the hosted servers. Self-hosting Renovate is essential for organizations that have their code repositories behind multiple layers of internal security.
Job Scheduler and Webhooks
At the core of Renovate Enterprise is the job scheduler and priority job queue, which automates the process of running Renovate against each of the onboarded repositories. Combined with this, webhooks will trigger a Renovate job when important activities occur on the repository – like updating a package file or merging a PR.
Enterprise Edition-Only Features
While the above features come standard with the free Renovate Community Edition, the following features are available only with Renovate Enterprise Edition.
Dedicated Support
Renovate Enterprise Edition comes with a support package from Mend.io, so there is always someone there to help you get up and running, maximize the benefits of Renovate, and easily troubleshoot any issues that might arise.
Unlimited Scalability
While the free versions of Renovate are limited to processing one repository at a time, Renovate Enterprise unlocks unlimited server scalability. This means an organization can scale out their own server resources to deliver Renovate updates in a highly responsive manner, allowing them to balance their own cost vs performance needs.
Premium Features
The Enterprise version of Renovate comes with additional features that are not available in the free versions, including Smart Merge Control, which is a feature that allows developers to customize the way PRs are delivered based on how likely an update is to pass the automated tests. As an example, a repo might be configured to suppress bad updates, group highly trusted updates, or even auto-merge updates of very high confidence. This can help developers quickly process updates with limited testing and with less failures, providing significant productivity gains.
Benefits
- Automatic dependency updates. The sophisticated job scheduler and priority job queue ensure that Renovate runs continuously against all your repositories, even while you sleep. Updates are automatically delivered to your door with pull requests ready to merge.
- Highly-responsive interactivity. With unlimited processing power, Renovate Enterprise can rapidly respond to all developer interactions on the repository.
- Reduced technical debt. Keeping dependencies updated is the most effective way to reduce security vulnerabilities in an application. Also, updates usually include bug fixes or performance improvements, thus improving the overall quality of your application code.
- Improved productivity. Utilizing Renovate with advanced features like Smart Merge Control can drastically reduce developer effort relating to dependency maintenance.
- Trusted insights. Only Mend Renovate has the knowledge of millions of successful merges to provide insights into the adoption, passing rates, and merge success of updates being applied. This information helps you make decisions with improved confidence about which updates to accept into your application.
The importance of dependency management
Keeping dependencies up to date is one of the most effective ways to reduce technical debt and avoid software vulnerabilities. Dependency management is now a vital part of any proactive application security strategy and a key component of a best-in-class development function. That’s why so many of the world’s most prominent corporations and organizations rely on Mend Renovate to manage their application dependencies.
Now, with Mend Renovate Enterprise Edition, there is a commercially supported version of Renovate built with the power to handle enterprise-grade needs!