CloudBees announces the Continuous Delivery FoundationEnterprise DevOps vendor, CloudBees, has announced the Continuous Delivery Foundation. It will operate under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. Its aim is to drive adoption of continuous delivery through the promotion of open source projects, best practice and industry specifications.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi, CTO, CloudBees
Kohsuke Kawaguchi, CTO, CloudBees

According to Kohsuke Kawaguchi, creator of Jenkins and CTO at CloudBees: “The time has come for a robust, vendor-neutral organization dedicated to advancing continuous delivery.

“The CDF represents an opportunity to raise the awareness of CD beyond the technology people. For projects like Jenkins and Jenkins X, it represents a whole new level of maturity. We look forward to helping the CDF grow the CD ecosystem and foster collaboration between top developers, end users and vendors.”

What are the goals of the Continuous Delivery Foundation?

Delivering the right software when it is needed and in a stable condition is no longer an aspiration but a demand from the business. The business also wants that software delivered tomorrow not sometime in the future. To do that, organisations have had to change the way they design, develop, test and deploy software to production.

Underpinning that change is continuous delivery. It automates as much of the process as possible, especially testing and deployment. At present, there is an increasing number of tools on the market that are designed to help organisations deliver this.

The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) wants to be a vendor neutral home for open source projects in the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) space. It will do that by:

  • Providing a set of best practices for anyone involved in CI/CD
  • Create a set of industry specifications that will ensure tools can interoperate and users are not locked into a single solution
  • Make collaboration and interoperability a key element of each tool
  • Build a library of best practices
  • Deliver training materials to help developers, operations teams, project managers, security teams and test teams understand how to build an effective CI/CD environment
  • Develop an open source software based open development model

What open source projects is the CDF looking at?

The CDF has chosen the first four projects that it will host. It claims that there are several additional projects already applying for consideration. It has also established a technical committee to look at other submissions.

The first four projects are:

  • Jenkins
  • Jenkins X
  • Spinnaker
  • Tektron

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

There has been a significant uptake in the use of open source software over the past five years. Organisations are beginning to accept its place inside their IT software solutions as the market matures. IT departments no longer see open source as a gamble. While some may still want to take on the basic open source software and build test, patching and integration solutions, there is an increasing number of organisations offering curated versions of those projects.

These curated or commercial versions offer support, increased stability and a guarantee that the software will be available long-term. They also take enterprise requests and build new integrations and features that are then reintroduced to the core open source repository. This also ensures that there is ongoing development for successful projects and reduces the risk of software being abandoned.

The involvement of CloudBees in this project comes as no surprise. It has been one of the most active CI/CD players in recent years. It runs the DevOps World conference every year and already had best practices and training materials in place. While the Linux Foundation is working with CloudBees to drive the initial stages of the CDF, it also knows that it must prove to the wider community that this is a vendor neutral project.

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