March 12th 2019 a new vendor neutral foundation was created: the CDF!
CDF is founded by Cloudbees and Google. For now the project has Jenkins (including the ‘jenkins-x’ project), Spinnaker (Netflix) and Tekton (kubernetes / google) on board and many companies as founding members.
It was announced as definitive at FOSDEM in februari.
Some background on continuous delivery
DevOps is becoming the norm for modern software development. A major point made in DevOps is avoiding manual chores since it leads to mistakes and general slowness.
Continuous delivery is key in the ‘automate everything’ goal, but it’s also a very big and not so well defined topic.
The concept, coming from the Agile manifesto principles, being not-so-well defined is not a problem in itself (agile kinda accepts vagueness, uncertainty and complexity). However, when organizations and systems try to work together it helps to have some shared language, a clearly defined scope, etc.
The number of options and wildly varying approaches when implementing continuous delivery is incredible.
It’s also not hard to see that this new foundation is closely related to the Cloud Native computing foundation (https://www.cncf.io/) also organized through the Linux Foundation.
So Why a foundation?
- The foundation is a place for different groups to agree to conventions.
- These organizations now actually have a place to show their commitment (and get some bragging rights).
- Money! For example to put into conferences or even development work.
- Common, shared representation for shared systems/standards etc. No need to explain everything yourself.
- Being part of open source structures improves the willingness for open source developers and projects to consider cooperation, overly commercial alternatives are usually avoided.
Some thoughts
Cloudbees, the folks from the Jenkins project, initiated the idea of creating a foundation. It seems to me this has everything to do with Kubernetes being the ubiquitous cloud platform and the cloud actually becoming the default option.
Jenkins has been struggling and has had some bad press the last few years so they have reason to want to look into new options. Jenkins-x is actually an effort to integrate into Kubernetes.
The people from the Kubernetes side are looking into ways to smoothen the CD developer experience within Kubernetes.
From both perspectives there’s reason to want to have standards and apply insights, experience and share code.
For many others it’s just a relief to possibly get more stability from the tooling around continuous delivery.
Having a friction less continuous delivery pipeline is seen as a basic requirement nowadays for modern software projects. Seeing open platforms like openshift implement CD while hiding complexity is very appealing. An open source community and vendor neutral components are ways in which platform providers can move extra fast, and users appreciate that.
