Quali hopes to forge stronger connections with the developer community by contributing plugins for its DevOps cloud sandbox platform as open source code, a move the company announced today.

Quali is in the business of providing cloud sandboxes, which developers can use to build replicas of production environments for testing purposes. Cloud sandboxes are an important part of the DevOps scene, which emphasizes minimizing the barriers separating development from deployment. With a cloud sandbox, developers can test code more quickly and put it into production knowing that it worked in a model environment.

Cloud sandboxes are available from other vendors, too. But Quali says its solution is unique because it supports mixed infrastructure, which means developers can create cloud sandboxes that mimic a combination of physical and virtual environments.

To attract more developers to its cloud sandbox solution, Quali has announced that it is making the plugins for the environment, which it calls Shells, open source under an Apache 2.0 license. Along similar lines, the company has extended its API and released new Python libraries designed to help developers integrate with the cloud sandbox.

Quali says it hopes these moves will help to build a new open source community surrounding its platform.

“We felt that as our customer base has grown, our customers could benefit from an open community for development, collaboration and sharing of Shells, which are the building-block components of a Sandbox,” said Joan Wrabetz, Quali CTO. “Making them available in an open language like Python and archiving the source in GitHub under an open source license enables our partners and users to accelerate their automation efforts.”

The new offerings are available now. In addition, Quali will launch a Web-based developer portal with other resources for integrating with its platform within sixty days, according to a statement from the company.