The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), the open-source software foundation that seeks to improve the world’s capacity to deliver software with security and speed, today announced the new Events Special Interest Group (SIG).
The Events SIG is a vendor-neutral, open effort that will drive the standardization and interoperability between Continuous Delivery systems through events. Events are described as “a data record expressing an occurrence and its context, where occurrence is the capture of a statement of fact during the operation of a software system.” The Events SIG is a collaboration with individuals from several companies including Armory, DeployHub, Dynatrace, eBay, Ericsson, Harness, IBM, and others.
CD.Foundation fosters the creation of SIGs like this one because we believe that this work should happen in a neutral forum where users come together with maintainers of open-source CD projects and have a dialog about the challenges we need to address.
Why do we need to focus on events in CI/CD?
“The landscape of tools in the CI/CD space is growing, and with the nature of open source development where new niched tools frequently appear, we see no reason to believe that there will be one tool to handle all needs in a complete CI/CD system. For these tools to co-exist in the same end-to-end system, they’d need to be able to communicate with each other, propagating information from one tool to the other. Communicating through broadcasted events gives the flexibility for any tool in the CI/CD system such as metrics collectors, analyzers, visualizers, etc to act instantly on the same information as is used by the tools that drive the flow. We believe that a common event protocol would be a major enabler for this. To define such a common event protocol we’d need to collaborate between all major players in the CI/CD domain, and we believe that this SIG is the perfect place for that to happen.”
– Emil Bäckmark, Ericsson, co-chair of the Events SIG.
“The roots of the CDF Events SIG are in the CDF Interoperability SIG, and we continue on that mission with a greater focus on standardizing events in the continuous delivery (CD) space. We don’t want to reinvent what already exists: in the cloud-native space, CloudEvents provide a shared format to send events on top of several transport layers, such as HTTP, AMQP, NATS, MQTT, and more. As a SIG we will build on top of existing standards, to define and promote shared semantics in the events produced and consumed in the CD space.
“Our work will make it easier for different systems to talk to each other; it will also enable an ecosystem of tools for monitoring, tracing, measuring, and orchestrating through standard events.”
– Andrea Frittoli, IBM, co-chair of the Events SIG
“Continuous delivery is evolving to support the demands of a cloud-native environment where hundreds of independently deployed microservices are being updated all day long. Core to this evolution is event-driven CD, critical for achieving DevOps at scale. The CDF Events SIG will be key to driving this technology forward.”
– Tracy Ragan, DeployHub, Governing Board member at CD.Foundation
“Modern enterprises need to provide continuous delivery platforms that scale across hundreds of teams while being easy to maintain and extend. Scripts building point-to-point integrations for proprietary APIs won’t enable this. Standardized events are an integral part to enable these platforms based on event-driven control planes and services”
– Alois Reitbauer, Dynatrace
Events SIG spun out of the CDF Interoperability SIG
“Events was one of the first topics we started investigating within CDF Interoperability SIG and it is great to see this topic has got the attention and interest it deserves. Congratulations to all SIG Events contributors for taking the next step in their journey and looking forward to our continued collaboration between SIG Interoperability, SIG Events, broader CD Ecosystem, and sister communities.”
– Fatih Degirmenci, Ericsson, co-chair of the Interoperability SIG.
“Standardization of event data is an integral and increasingly important way to increase interoperability between CI/CD pipelines and tools. We welcome the creation of the Events SIG to enable the community to dive deeper into the role events play in ci/cd systems and in creating greater interoperability. There is a great deal of wider community interest in this topic and the CDF’s Events SIG is well placed to be a vital, open, neutral environment in which these discussions can take place.”
– Kara de la Marck, CloudBees, co-chair of the Interoperability SIG.
“We’re excited to announce the Events SIG because it is a foundational component to interoperability between the sea of CI/CD tools. The Events SIG is a critical group that allows the myriad of CI/CD tooling to work together by creating common standards on how events will be emitted and processed. We believe this will enable users to create their own best-in-class experience by tying together different tools in the stack.”
– Isaac Mosquera, Armory, the Event SIG sponsor from the CDF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC)
Join the Events SIG initiative
- Join the #events-in-cicd channel on CDF Slack and introduce yourself.
- Submit a pull-request with your name to the SIG Events README
- Regularly join the workstream meetings.
Meetings
The Events SIG meets regularly to discuss proposals on a common events protocol for CD systems.
Attend the next meeting to participate in the group – it is open to anyone to join in. For the agenda, meeting time, and minutes click here.
More Resources
Listen to the Events Episode of The Pipeline podcast where Andrea Frittoli, IBM; Emil Bäckmark, Ericsson; Mauricio Salatino, Camunda; and Ravi Lachhman, Harness talk about how events can fix problems related to interoperability, notification of failure issues, and poor automation.
Events Special Interest Group
Interoperability Special Interest Group
- Interoperability SIG Information
- Interoperability SIG Discussions
- Interoperability SIG Meeting Recordings
About the Continuous Delivery Foundation
The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) seeks to improve the world’s capacity to deliver software with security and speed. The CDF is a vendor-neutral organization that is establishing best practices of software delivery automation, propelling education and adoption of CD tools, and facilitating cross-pollination across emerging technologies. The CDF is home to many of the fastest-growing projects for CD, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Tekton, and Spinnaker. The CDF is part of the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about the CDF, please visit https://cd.foundation.
