WELCOME

Welcome to the 2020 Continuous Delivery Foundation annual report. Comments and feedback are welcome at hello@cd.foundation. 

CDF PROJECTS

The Continuous Delivery Foundation is home to the most critical and innovative projects for software delivery:

CDF INTERACTIVE LANDSCAPE

This landscape is intended as a map to explore the Continuous Delivery community, and also shows the member organizations of the Continuous Delivery Foundation.

What is an interactive landscape? The concept started when the CNCF began the process of cataloging different types of tools for building out a cloud-native architecture. This led to the creation of the CNCF Interactive Landscape. Turns out this tool became very helpful to all of us sorting out this new and exciting modern architecture. In the interest of providing a similar reference, the CD Foundation defined their own version of the interactive landscape to help clarify the tools needed to adopt a fully automated CD process.

This first version of the Landscape was created by members of the CDF and reviewed by the CDF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) led by Kohsuke Kawaguchi – the creator of Jenkins. This is not the end of our story. We are asking that the broader community, members and non-members of the CDF, begin updating the CD Interactive Landscape with new sections and tools, or even correct where a solution fits in – we could have gotten this wrong and apologize in advance if we did.

The guidelines and directions for updating the landscape can be found here. Visit the Continuous Delivery Interactive Landscape.

BEST PRACTICES SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP

Continuous Delivery is a goal for many organizations. Research shows that implementing continuous delivery practices boosts organizational performance as well as strengthens organization culture. Nevertheless, today every organization that wants to achieve that is forced to go through the same cycle of trial and error and expensive learning before they can reach that goal. What makes this especially painful is the fact that many of the lessons that organizations end up learning were lessons that others had already learned before. For example lessons such as:

• What are good strategies for reducing the blast radius of software changes?
• How can canaries help increase confidence in the delivery workflow?

END-USER COUNCIL

Implementing continuous delivery practices yield many benefits for organizations, including the ability to deliver features faster, pivot quickly in response to industry and world events and respond to fast feedback and build a deeper relationship with users. Cloud, open source, and continuous delivery have combined to form the basis of technology modernization, but spoiler alert: it’s not just about the technology. The platforms and tooling are maturing, but bringing about organizational change requires relationship-building and other under-utilized “soft skills”.

The Continuous Delivery Foundation end-user council provides the opportunity for end-user organizations to have context-rich discussions on how various organizations pursue their modernization efforts in the most effective way.

Discussions are chaired by John Mark Walker of Capital One. CDF End-User Council is open to leadership teams from CDF end-user members and guest organizations.

ECOSYSTEM TOOLS & PROJECT SERVICES

DEV STATS

This is a toolset to visualize GitHub archives using Postgres databases and Grafana dashboards. Everything is open source so that it can be used by other CDF and non-CDF open source projects. The only requirement is that project must be hosted on a public GitHub repository/repositories. Visit Dev Stats. 

SERVICE DESK

Leverage the expertise of our parent organization, The Linux Foundation, which hosts other successful projects and several umbrella foundations including CDF, CNCF, Hyperledger, LF AI, and EdgeX. Through the service desk, you will be able to access full-time CDF staff who are eager to assist your project in myriad ways and help make it successful. View the Service Desk to support ongoing requests from members, projects, and community developers.

CDF Projects have a specific CDF Lifecycle overseen by the Technical Oversight Committee. For projects to “Graduate,” they must meet the following specific criteria. The Graduated Stage is for projects that have reached their growth goals and are now on a sustaining cycle of development, maintenance, and long-term support. Graduated Stage projects are used commonly in enterprise production environments and have large, well-established project communities.

To learn more about how to submit a project to the TOC, review the following criteria. The TOC welcomes projects to submit at any time. 

2020 Milestones

• sd-local cli tool to run Screwdriver builds in your local machine
• Kata Container Runtime support for running Kubernetes builds
• Remote-Join Pipeline workflow feature to connect and build multiple parallel external build pipelines
• New User interface view for viewing jobs
• Native support for Enterprise Sonarqube for enhanced code quality analysis
• New microservice for orchestrating build queues
• Build cache support for local disk-based cache in Kubernetes builds to improve build speed

Platform

• Plugin Framework early access produced 15 plugins including Lambda, Nomad; went GA in December
• General availability of the Spinnaker Kubernetes Operator for automated platform management and a K8s-native GitOps workflow
• Observability plugin is now GA and includes a new monitoring solution, providing critical visibility to Spinnaker operators
• Central CVE management process introduced by the Security SIG
• Additional improvements were made to the UI, and support was added for pipeline notifications via Microsoft Teams

Community

• Spinnaker Slack crossed the 10,000 user threshold! 
• Established project vision and mission
• Launched Spinnaker Gardening Days hackathon program
• Founded the Contributor Experience SIG
• Implementation of platform telemetry for global tracking of OSS usage stats to inform the roadmap

Ecosystem

• Spinnaker now on AWS Marketplace
• Splunk app built for Spinnaker log analysis/visualization

2020 Milestones

• 600+ contributors from 100+ companies!
• 100+ Tasks in the Catalog from 10+ companies!
• 12+ releases of Pipeline, including the first beta!
• 6+ releases of Triggers, with a beta release coming soon
• New projects started include Chains for supply chain security and Results for long-term execution history
• And of course, fun new logos for Hub, Dashboard, CLI, Triggers, Chains and more!

WELCOME NEW MEMBERS!

 The CDF launched in 2019 with 23 members and in 2020 we wrapped up the year with 38 members in total. Seeing a 15% growth from 2019 to 2020.

Organizations join CDF because they want to take an active role in supporting the growth and evolution of continuous delivery models and best practices on top of sustaining the open-source projects within the CDF. 

If you are interested in joining or have questions about membership, please contact us. 

THANK YOU TO ALL OUR SPONSORS!

The CDF found immense value in participating in industry events this 2020. Unfortunately, 2020 recreated industry events by going virtual. This presented many challenges for everyone that relies on such events to connect and grow. Of course, the biggest disappointment of all was not getting to socialize and network in person. Life definitely handed us some sour lemons this year, but I have to say that the CDF made some sweet lemonade with them. Read the blog CDF at Industry Events 2020 for the full event presence recap.

CDF SIG INTEROPERABILITY 2020: A YEAR IN REVIEW

The formation of the Interoperability Special Interest Group (SIG) was approved by the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) TOC in January 2020, and this week marks the first year of the SIG’s formation. 🎉 We wanted to reflect on the past year, the work we’ve been doing, and our achievements. We have made great strides in bringing people together; growing our community; getting to know each other; improving communication on interoperability and common concepts among projects within the CI/CD ecosystem, including identifying challenges and trends; and starting work on an initial set of topics of critical interest.

The value of promoting greater discussion and work on interoperability within the CI/CD ecosystem became evident in October 2019, when the CDF Governing Board ratified 9 strategic goals, including fostering tool interoperability. Read the Blog.

• Interoperability is identified as one of the strategic goals by CDF GB
• SIG Interoperability was approved by CDF TOC during January 2020
• During 2020, SIG focused on:
  • Outreach to increase collaboration 
  • Identified key challenges and trends
  • Worked on establishing shared vocabulary and made the first contribution to domain “Rosetta Stone”
  • Released the SIG Roadmap
  • Adopted the workstream set up to allow people to focus on a specific topic
  • Started the work on reusable libraries, events in CI/CD, and standardized metadata
• Participation to SIG increased significantly, enabling cross-pollination across communities and industries
  • Members: 6 -> 23
  • Represented companies: 6 -> 19
  • Represented communities: 3 -> 9
• Represented industries
  •  Webscale, Cloud, CI/CD, Telecom, E-Commerce, Startup, Software
• Represented communities:

ROSETTA STONE UPDATE

• One of the challenges in the CI/CD domain is a lack of common terminology
• The tools and technologies often use different terms to describe the same thing
• It is critical for us as humans to communicate with each other before we get the machines to talk to each other
• CDF SIG Interoperability collected terms used by 15 different tools, including SCM tools and created mapping between them
• The effort has been shared with the broader ecosystem

DIVERSITY & INCLUSION GROUP: (she)DF

One of the primary goals of the group (she)DF is to be a safe space for women from all communities to come together to discuss industry topics, share their expertise, employment opportunities, and network. This is our first diversity & inclusion initiative and we aspire to create more. As we grow, we plan to also be able to create more spaces and channels for all underrepresented communities to congregate and represent. I realize that it’s important for us to put our money where our mouths are. In 2020, aside from creating a group that caters to women we ensured that we had better representation in our speaker lineup for our inaugural event, cdCon. The planning committee invited community members from underrepresented communities to participate as keynote & session speakers as a measure to ensure we had representation in our program and attendees. We also partnered with Women Who Code & Black Girls Code and raised $5,000 on their behalf. For more details, check out the transparency report from our first event. We acknowledge that these efforts are barely scratching the surface but we are committed to figuring out how to create genderqueer and racially inclusive communities.

(she)DF is still young and evolving. Currently, we are a network of over 80 women on LinkedIn. We are so excited by the growth in membership, especially, as this initiative just launched this year in 2020. We saw the opportunity to create a group for women hosted by the female leadership of the CDF. The group is currently functioning as a community board where members can share events, blogs, jobs, and a fun meme or two. Diversity and inclusion are a priority at CDF and we hope to take (she)DF to the next level in 2021. We are launching a quarterly luncheon for the ladies of the (she)DF and if vaccines permit we might be able to do a few of these at an industry event in person in late 2021. If you identify as a woman in tech we encourage you to join our network of women!  Read the full Blog.

Join us on LinkedIn – (she)DF

CDF COMMUNITY UPDATE: SUPPORTING DIVERSITY & INCLUSION

As I reflect on cdCon 2020—I’m super proud of what the planning committee achieved. This group of contributors showed up to each meeting ready to brainstorm, collaborate and execute the CDF’s first virtual event. All while trying to figure out how to adjust to the new normal that the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic descended upon us. During this planning process, this group also saw an opportunity for the CD Foundation to make a difference in the way we create and manage communities. I continue to have very strong opinions and feelings toward 2020 but I’ve been challenged to work harder at correcting so many of the wrongs that we see in the world.  Overall, I believe that it also empowered many of us to make the many necessary changes to ensure that we are committed to having safe and inclusive communities. Read the full blog. 

CDF PODCAST – WRAPS UP THE YEAR WITH 6,400+ DOWNLOADS!

Wow! The Pipeline: All Things CD & DevOps podcast launched April 2020 and for the past eight months the podcast has hosted 25+ industry experts and trailblazers of the CD & DevOps community.

The podcast was launched with the intent to be a series of interviews with industry experts, leaders, and innovators. Each of these episodes has been created with the vision to curate digital, easily digestible, and fun content to help you stay up to date on the latest trends, news, and innovations. The goal of the CD Foundation is to deliver content that helps expand your knowledge on the vast CD & DevOps ecosystem and the podcast is only one of the various programs designed to help deliver on this goal. The Pipeline was designed to help you learn from your peers, as well as, thought leaders in the CDF community who have been there and done that. We are excited to wrap up the year with a total of 25 episodes and launching season 2 this coming January 2021! See the full stats. 

CDF WEBCAST: END OF YEAR SUMMARY

CDF webcasts provide a cost-effective way to educate the community about trends and open source CI/CD technologies. Webcasts are offered to members, CDF incubating & graduated projects, CDF Ambassadors, and CDF SIGs. Read the full blog. 

Top 5 Webcast Episodes by Attendance

1. Managing Full Application Lifecycle Using GitOps – Viktor Farcic
2. Spinnaker Basics – Nirmalya Sen
3. Evolving Your CD Pipeline for Microservices with DeployHub – Tracy Ragan
4. CI/CD as a product – Garima Bajpai
5. A Guide to Event-driven SRE-inspired DevOps – Andreas Grabner

CDF TWITCH:  CODE & TALK LIVESTREAM SERIES

The CDF Twitch Stream Series is a “code and talk” livestream occurring weekly using Tekton, Jenkins, Jenkins X, and Spinnaker with code shared on GitHub. Alternating between developers (writing plenty of code) and consumers (write no code, pick what’s already done and assemble).

Hosted by Adam and JJ both CDF Ambassadors and community members from IBM – the goal of the program is to turn this into something where folks from various backgrounds, companies, industries can participate and solve challenges together using CDF projects and recommended best practices. Follow us on our Twitch Channel.

Welcome to the official CDF Job Board. The CDF job board is the perfect place to find the top CI/CD and DevOps talent. It’s free to post and apply for a job. Post or find your next job. 

CDF NEWSLETTER: 2020 CONTENT HISTORY

This year, we launched the CDF Newsletter to share technical content with the CDF Community. The CDF Newsletter is sent monthly to over 7,194 subscribers. Previous issues of the newsletter can be read on our website. Review all the stats. 

Here are the themes we tackled this year, starting in May, that provide industry guidance on modern continuous delivery:

• Interoperability
• MLOps
• Security
• Jenkins
• cdCon
• Hacktoberfest
• Top 5 cdCon Talks
• Real-world Continuous Delivery Use Cases 

Want to receive the CDF Newsletter? Subscribe

TOP 5 CDF BLOG POSTS OF 2020

You may not know, but the CDF blog is full of informative content published every week, sometimes every day of the week!

Here are the top 5 posts (by page views):

1. Introducing the Jenkins Dark Theme by Tim Jacomb
2. Tekton in 2020 and beyond! by the owners of the different projects, including Christie Wilson, Andrea Frittoli, Adam Roberts, and Vincent Demeester
3. Jenkins UI Gets a Makeover by Jeremy Hartley
4. Announcing the CD Foundation MLOps SIG by Animesh Singh, MLOps SIG Chair
5. Introducing Tekton Hub by the Tekton project

In theory, every developer knows that security is paramount, but in practice, it’s a different story. We at the CDF know it can be intimidating, that’s why we’ve dedicated this month’s newsletter to helping you navigate the security landmines. Thank you to our authors for contributing these articles.  Read the Security Newsletter.

DevSecOps: Building a Trusted Software Supply Chain

DevSecOps—we’ve all heard it, what does it actually mean? Read this article to turn buzzword into practice.

Security Principles for Cloud Native CI/CD Systems with Jenkins X

Discover some security features available in Jenkins X and why you should enable them.

An Inside Look at the Innovation happening in OSS Spinnaker’s CVE Process

Demystifying CVEs and CVSS Scores and using them to improve security best practices.

We believe that it is crucial that Machine Learning and AI assets can be incorporated into continuous delivery pipelines in the same way as any other software component. 

Given the broad divergence between Machine Learning and conventional software practice, this outcome is currently far from certain, which is why, in 2020, we have published the first edition of the MLOps Roadmap, which seeks to communicate the key challenges involved in managing Machine Learning assets in production environments and sets out a vision for future best practice across CI/CD tooling.

The Roadmap is open to all and is available here: http://bit.ly/3ncLEMI

Thank you for sticking with us till the end. There are no right words to summarize 2020. We will always remember the community members, friends, and family that we lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For 2021 & beyond – we will continue opening our doors to all community members. We are focused on creating safe & inclusive environments for everyone. We have cdCON 2021 coming to you in June & we are brewing many more programs to share important thought leadership content with the greater CD & DevOps community. If you are new, we hope you join the community soon! Thank you to all our contributing members. We couldn’t do it without you.