The Birth of The Continuous Delivery Foundation
Certainly not every day that the Linux Foundation creates a new foundation. A few days ago, the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) was announced to the public. This is an exciting time as seen in my Tweet (well at least for me). The addition of this foundations is timely as the other very famous Linux Foundation, foundation the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is expanding at a rapid pace that groupings of sub projects or projects that did not 100% fit the bill of the CNCF was due to have their own foundation.
Rapid Growth of the CNCF
I was very fortunate to attend my first CNCF event, KubeCon in Seattle in December. I wrote about my experience in more detail on my company blog but my main take away was the immense growth the foundation was seeing. Take a quick look at the CNCF Landscape , this blew me away at the number of projects that were headed into the sandbox or incubating in the CNCF. There is codification in areas that have not seen codification before. The large push into fine grained software defined and controlled infrastructure was very clear at KubeCon. Excited to be attending KubeCon this year in San Diego and will certainly be blogging out thoughts. Though the pipelines that glue our application infrastructure together finally has their own foundation.
DevOps Ductape
A former colleague of mine made the comment that Jenkins is like DevOps Duct Tape ha! I certainly can see how this analogy is true. Recently a few of us weighed in on the the different Jenkins Flavors out there on The New Stack. One of the most iconic projects in the CI space has to be Jenkins. Fast forward to today, our development pipelines are the lifeblood of many development organizations. There has been a rise in several projects such as Spinnaker and Harness taking into account more such as performance and the underlying infrastructure into the pipelines. The picture in this blog post is me and my buddy Justin who works for Armory who is commercializing Spinnaker while we both were at KubeCon last year. A lot of times the CI/CD infrastructure is the infrastructure moving or provisioning applications and infrastructure. The time is certainly right for the Continuous Delivery Foundation.
The Right Time for the CDF
Several trends are occurring in in the CI/CD world. Given that the importance of our pipelines are crucial to our organizations now. The first major trend is the platform architecture of the CI/CD platforms. A few years ago, the CI/CD infrastructure could be seen as a bottle-neck. This became really apparent during the container boom as executing on your Docker Compose would be pretty resource intensive. This lead to CI/CD providers such as Jenkins to create distributed builds and even underlying orchestrator platforms such as Mesosphere DC/OS to provide build orchestration. The re-platforming seems to have been paying off for CI/CD platforms. The second major trend is GitOps. If you are curious on what GitOps is, DZone has a pretty solid article. TL;DR on GitOps, treating your pipelines as code and doing heavy lifting with Pull Requests. I am going through learning more about the CDF and feeling pretty excited.
Learning More on the CDF
The project I was least familiar with in the CDF is Tekton. Taking a look at Tekton’s GitHub page is where I started my learning journey about the project. Sacha, the CloudBees founder (also an ex JBoss person like myself) gave a solid blog post on “Day One” of the CDF which was on March 12th. CloudBees championed for the formation of the CDF which makes sense to solidify CI/CD technologies in our Cloud Native world. Pretty excited to see how all of this plays out this year. I will be giving a talk at SRECon this year and will certainly check the pulse with those who are the vanguards of web scale.
