CD Foundation Launches with Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, Tekton
The time was right for the CI/CD industry to come together and agree on some standards, noted Chris Aniszczyk, Linux Foundation vice president of developer relations.
“If you look at the cloud native landscape, there are at least 20 to 30 tools out there, and it’s constantly growing, with a mix of startups and cloud providers,” said Aniszczyk. “It’s an opportune time amongst vendors and users to bring sanity to this space.”
To this end, the Linux Foundation has unveiled the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), which will provide a “vendor-neutral home” to the Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, and Tekton projects. The CDF launches with 22 founding members, including Autodesk, CapitalOne, CloudBees, GitLab, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Red Hat, among others.
In speaking of the news, Aniszczyk half-jokingly referred to his employer as a “foundation-as-a-service,” with its latest endeavor set to provide a similar set of functions as the numerous foundations created before it — providing the infrastructure to help promote open source technologies and the space in which competitors can work toward an otherwise common goal.
The Linux Foundation is already home to at least a half dozen other foundations and more than a 175 open source projects, spread out across multiple foundations, including the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Ceph Foundation, and JS Foundation, among numerous others.
While continuous delivery is normally found alongside continuous integration, Andy Glover, director of delivery engineering at Netflix says that the CDF begins at the moment of code check-in.
“We begin at the moment that the artifact is produced. We’ve seen an evolution in terms of CI/CD,” Glover said. “Continuous integration is almost folding into the notion of continuous delivery.”
The CDF will “foster collaboration between the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors to evangelize CI/CD and DevOps methodologies, define/document best practices, provide guidelines, and create training materials to enable any software development team around the world to implement CI/CD best practices,” according to a Linux Foundation statement.
The CDF starts with four primary projects: Google donated Tekton, Google and Netflix jointly donated Spinnaker, and Jenkins and Jenkins X, which is an open source cloud native orchestrator for Jenkins, both joined independently. Jenkins is a leading open source automation server, while Jenkins X is an open source alternative to Jenkins for Kubernetes, and Spinnaker is an open source multi-cloud CD solution. Tekton, meanwhile, provides an open source project and specification for CI/CD components. Each project will contribute a member to the technical board, and a governing board will be elected in the near future.
Kim Lewandowski, product manager at Google Cloud, said she joined the DevOps team at Google Cloud about a year ago and spent a lot of time talking to both customers and developers, and the problem quickly became apparent.
I mean, how is this not a natural fit for CNCF? pic.twitter.com/JoGBrmeRpz
— Liz Rice 🐝 💙💛 (@lizrice) March 12, 2019
“I quickly saw how fragmented the tooling landscape is today. It makes for a brittle software delivery process. We at Google feel that now is the right time to define these practices and guidelines,” said Lewandowski. “I learned how much different terminology is used to mean the same thing. Industry leaders have the first step to agree on the common nouns. Is a pipeline a workflow or an orchestration? How about a build or an artifact? There’s also a huge opportunity to work with everyone on security best practices. What does it really mean that my supply chain is secure? We need to make it easy to show that customers are using best practices and vulnerabilities aren’t going into production.”
Lewandowski said that Google started building Tekton with inspiration from Kukbernetes, and now the project is joining the CDF with the intent of not only providing the basic building blocks for other CI/CD tooling, but also helping determine and solidify standards for the industry as a whole.
Aniszczyk similarly summed up the purpose of the CDF in the Linux Foundation statement, saying that “there’s no defining industry specifications around pipelines and workflows to aid portability amongst tools. Capital One, CircleCI, CloudBees, Google, Huawei, JFrog, Netflix and the other Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) founding members recognize the need for a neutral home for collaboration and integration to solve this problem. The CDF will establish a community of projects to advance industry best practices and innovation around CI/CD.”
