Jenkins Celebrates 15 Years of Transforming Software Delivery

Jenkins Community Celebrates 15 years of Continuous Delivery Automation and Innovation at DevOps World | Jenkins World

DEVOPS WORLD | JENKINS WORLD, SAN FRANCISCO – AUGUST 14, 2019 – The Jenkins project, comprised of the community of practitioners using Jenkins^®, today celebrated its 15^th birthday at DevOps World | Jenkins World with a recap of milestones showcasing the community’s growth and the project’s defining impact on the global software industry.

Jenkins is the world’s leading open source automation server, used by companies large and small to implement continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). Originally developed in 2004 and called Hudson, Jenkins’ impact has grown consistently over the years to the point where experts regularly describe Jenkins as the de facto tool for CI/CD.

So far this year, the Jenkins project has been a key driver in the formation of the Continuous Delivery Foundation, has continued to experience strong uptake in the use of Jenkins and will recognize key contributors to the Jenkins project around the globe during Thursday’s keynote session at DevOps World | Jenkins World.

In establishing the Continuous Delivery Foundation, the Jenkins community worked with The Linux Foundation, CloudBees, Google and Netflix to create a new foundation for the diverse CI/CD space. In addition to Jenkins, the Continuous Delivery Foundation was established with several other CI/CD open source projects, including Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton. It serves as a vehicle to develop, nurture and promote open source projects, best practices and industry specifications related to continuous delivery.

The Continuous Delivery Foundation fosters vendor-neutral collaboration between the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors to further CI/CD best practices and industry specifications. Its mission is to grow and sustain projects that are part of the broad and growing continuous delivery ecosystem.

“This has been a great year for Jenkins, the Continuous Delivery Foundation and open source collaboration as a whole,” said Chris Aniszczyk, vice president at the Linux Foundation. “We all share a common mission – to support community-based development of projects that advance the state of software delivery. The Jenkins project has been squarely behind this effort from day one and today the community is stronger than ever.”

Also playing a key role in Jenkins’ transition to the CDF was CloudBees’ Tracy Miranda. Miranda took on the dual roles of CloudBees director of open source community and member of the governing board of the CDF. “CD is becoming a differentiator for organizations in every industry, yet adoption remains challenging. It’s an industry-wide problem that needs an industry-wide solution. From the CloudBees perspective, we see it as critical to have a neutral foundation where all agents of change can collaborate and contribute openly,” said Miranda. “Looking ahead to the next 15 years, we need to solve the complexity of CD adoption. With the CDF, we are well-equipped to do this in open source – building on top of all that we have learned in the Jenkins community over the years.”

During the period from July 1, 2018, through June 30, 2019, the Jenkins project achieved these milestones:

46% growth in active Jenkins installations¹ reporting usage data was in the period August 1, 2018 – July 31, 2019
The community experienced approximately 46 percent growth in active installations, reaching 265,956 installations as of July 31, 2019, compared to 182,236 installations as of August 1, 2018. Active installations are defined as Jenkins instances that report usage information back to the Jenkins project. This number is not representative of the total Jenkins instances in use worldwide; that number is significantly greater.

Approximately 15.8 million Jenkins developers
A recent Datanyze analysis of the CI vendor landscape showed that about 66 percent of continuous integration is being run on Jenkins. With an estimated 24 million developers, globally, according to Evans Data in its 2019 Global Developer Population and Demographics Study, approximately 15.8 million developers are using Jenkins.

254% growth in Jenkins Pipeline jobs
Finally, the combined number of defined Jenkins jobs increased during this same period from 19,946,119 in July 2018 to 30,281,905, or 52 percent growth. Specifically, Jenkins Pipeline jobs grew 254 percent in the same period. The dramatic growth in Jenkins Pipeline jobs demonstrates that organizations are accelerating their investment in modern software pipeline automation practices with Jenkins.

“Over the past 15 years, the Jenkins project has revolutionized the way software is built and delivered,” said Jenkins creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who also serves as chief scientist at CloudBees. “We have touched every industry and made a difference to every software team in the world.”

Additional Resources

¹The Jenkins community tracks statistics from active Jenkins installations that transmit usage information back to the project. The numbers do not represent a majority of Jenkins installations, only those who choose to report. Therefore, the numbers are conservative.

About the Continuous Delivery Foundation
Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) is a Linux Foundation initiative that serves as the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing projects, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, and Tekton. The CDF fosters collaboration between the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors to further continuous delivery best practices. For more information about the CDF, please visit https://cd.foundation.