The world’s leading tech companies have teamed up to launch a new foundation aimed at improving industry standardisation and oversight in continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) – an automated software testing and development practice.
The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), a project initiated by CloudBees, will be staffed and operated by the Linux Foundation. Its 22 founding members include CapitalOne, CloudBees, GitLab, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Red Hat.
The move will see CloudBees-led Jenkins, the open source tool for automating software delivery processes, become a CDF project. Google is also donating the source code of Tekton, a set of shared, open source components for building CI/CD systems, to the CDF and Netflix is donating its CI/CD platform Spinnaker to the foundation.
What is CI/CD?
Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of merging all developer working copies of a software project to a shared mainline several times a day.
Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time.
CI/CD practices have become increasingly mainstream amid a rise of microservices and cloud native architectures that require regular, secure software updates.
As CloudBees puts it: “Since every company in the world is now a software company, this new automated software delivery system is becoming the most mission-critical business system in the modern enterprise.”
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The CDF will aim to foster collaboration between the industry’s “top developers, end users and vendors to ensure that the CD approach to software engineering reaches its full potential to advance open source software development” it said.
Sacha Labourey CEO, CloudBees, who has helped drive the establishment of the CDF
Why is the CDF Needed?
The Linux Foundation’s Vice President, Developer Relations, Chris Aniszczyk said: “The number of available tools has increased, and there’s no defining industry specifications around pipelines and other CI/CD tools.”
“CloudBees, Google and the other CDF founding members recognize the need for a neutral home for collaboration and integration to solve this problem. The CDF will establish a community to advance industry best practices and innovation around CI/CD.”
CloudBees emphasised the point in a release, saying: “The challenges CI/CD projects face today, including tool complexity and lack of industry standardization around pipelines and other CI/CD tools, are stifling growth and innovation.”
“Lacking a neutral, legal entity and strong governance, projects struggle to attract valuable support from new developers and organizations. Projects maintainers and developers spend a significant amount of time and money on workarounds in areas such as security procedures and oversight.”
“This takes attention away from new development and innovation. A foundation with broad industry support will be able to more quickly define industry specs and create more opportunities for cross-project collaboration to improve tools for developers.”
CloudBees: Move Will Help Jenkins Grow
Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder of CloudBees, said the move of the Jenkins project to the CDF is the right thing to do: “We believe this is the right path for the Jenkins and Jenkins X projects, as well as the industry,” Labourey said.
“To date, CloudBees has been the primary supporter of all things Jenkins – and that support will unequivocally continue. However, the move of Jenkins to the CDF means the project will grow even more quickly than it has, with more contributors behind it. The CDF was a CloudBees-driven initiative, and we see it as vital to furthering CD. It benefits us all to do this.
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