2021 Annual Report

by CD Foundation Team

Happy 2022! Once again, CD Foundation’s 2021 Annual Report showcases the community’s resilience and the power of open source in the face of numerous challenges.

Despite the pandemic, our annual cdCon grew 3x in 2021 bringing together technology teams, enterprise leadership and open source communities to drive the future of software delivery. Plus it had a keynote line-up that represents the diversity we aspire to as a community. We could not have done it without the enormous support of our ever-engaged community. Thank you to all the attendees, speakers, sponsors and event organizers for coming together to create these very special days focused on continuous delivery, open source and community.

In 2021 we saw the incredible innovation and acceleration around vaccine technology and rollout – as well as the challenges with adoption and misinformation. Nevertheless, it was amazing to see how quickly things can change when people pull in the same direction. When it comes to technology, the adoption of continuous delivery practices still has a *very long* way to go. We were very proud this year for the first time to release not one but two “State of CD” reports, which are crucial to having a vendor-neutral shared view of industry maturity & how to move forward without leaving folks behind.

We also saw in 2021 additional challenges – high levels of burnout, especially for those in SRE and related roles and a tremendous increase in software supply chain attacks. These issues will be top of mind as we move in 2022. CDF is well positioned as a vendor-neutral community to tackle these tricky systemic issues and in 2022 we will continue to bring the ecosystem together to solve these in the open.

2021 Mission and Goals

The Continuous Delivery Foundation seeks to improve the world’s capacity to deliver software with security and speed, but to do so, we first have to work our building our brand, grow our end user community and cultivate the growth and adoption of our open source projects.

We’re also building the best possible teams of accomplished professionals that passionate about delivering beautiful software swiftly and simply.

In 2020, the Governing Board defined the mission of the Foundation as “to improve the world’s ability to deliver software with security and speed.” With this mission in mind, the board set the Foundation’s goals for 2021.

Goals

The Governing Board set three goals for the Continuous Delivery Foundation in 2021. They were:

1. End Users: Grow the end-user community while driving continuous delivery adoption
2. Brand: Engage the ecosystem to increase brand awareness
3. Projects: Cultivate growth and adoption of our portfolio of open source projects

CDF Governing Board

The Governing Board‘s role is to set the strategic direction, manage funds, and make business decisions that are in the best interest of the entire Continuous Delivery ecosystem. The summary minutes of their meetings are published on GitHub for you to read.

For 2021, Stephen Chin from JFrog was elected as Governing Board Chair and at the end of the year, Emily Freeman replaces Peder Ulander, who joined the Governing Board as AWS joined CDF as a Premier Member in June 2021.

Technical Oversight Committee

The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) is the team responsible for the technical vision, project oversight, and technical community decisions for the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). This year, the elected TOC Chair was Oleg Nenashev, Dynatrace. We also had 7 others elected to this great team! View the TOC’s Roadmap.

The TOC’s main goal is to support the growth and success of the CDF projects. In 2021 the TOC accepted two new open source projects to the Foundation: Shipwright and CDEvents.

Outreach Committee

The Outreach Committee is responsible for the overall marketing and outreach for CDF projects, ultimately managing and guiding CDF marketing for the Governing Board. The 2021 elected chair of the Outreach Committee was Tiffany Jachja, Vox Media.

Ambassador Working Group

In 2020 we launched the Ambassador Program, but with COVID-19 and all our other priorities, it was hard for the CDF’s core team to maintain a virtual community around the world. That’s why in 2021, we elected a new New Ambassador Chair, Garima Bajpai, to lead a new group of Ambassadors into 2022!

Ambassador Elections

Ambassador Voices (videos)

Achieving CDF’s 2021 Goals

Outlined below are the activities the CD Foundation and its community undertook in 2021 to achieve the three goals set by the governing board. Some of the sections will be pertinent to more than one goal but are categorized only under one for readability.

1. End Users: Grow the end-user community while driving continuous delivery adoption

End User Council

The 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. Read the 2021 Plan.

We hosted three events:

State of Continuous Delivery Report Series

In 2021, we launched the State of Continuous Delivery Report Series. The goal of this series is to dive deeper into the data and track the world’s capacity to deliver software with speed and security.

Read the reports:

2. Brand: Engage the Ecosystem to Increase Brand Awareness

cdCon 2021

The second cdCon took place June 23-24. Our second annual cdCon in 2021 was a huge success, growing 3x – in large part thanks to our community for embracing another virtual event. We also introduced the CDF Community Awards, here are the 2021 winners. View more details in the cdCon 2021 Transparency Report.

Here are some highlights:

2,911 attendees participated from 124 countries across 6 continents and their feedback was overwhelmingly positive
8% of attendees, 26% of speakers, and 56% of keynote speakers were women or non-binary (although 31% of attendees chose not to answer the question)
27 sponsors: 22 event sponsors, 3 community partners, and 2 media sponsors
133 sessions were hosted including 96 breakout sessions, 16 keynote sessions, 2 workshops, 5 Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and 14 Birds of a Feather (BoFs)

The Pipeline: All Things CD & DevOps Podcast

In 2021, The Pipeline Podcast is a big hit with the Continuous Delivery and DevOps Communities. Jacqueline Salinas started the program in 2020 and it’s grown incredibly fast in 2021. It turned 1 year old and reached new heights!

Statistics

Total downloads (all time): 27,396
Total episodes published in 2021: 38
Total downloads grew: 335%
Total episodes published vs 2020: 13 more
Number of countries/territories that tune in: 120
Number of cities that tune in: 3000+

SIGs

The CD Foundation has four active Special Interest Groups (SIGs) led by members of the community. Each of them leads important discussions that push Continuous Delivery forward. Join them:

All the SIG recordings are available on our YouTube Channel.

Awards

DevOps Dozen Finalists

The CD Foundation was a finalist for three industry awards from DevOps Dozen:

Best DevOps Survey/Analysis/Research: State of CD Report
Best DevOps-Related Podcast Series (Audio Only): The Pipeline Podcast
Best DevOps Virtual Event of the Year: cdCon

We didn’t win in our nominated categories but are happy to have been finalists.

cdCon Diversity Award

Our annual event, cdCon, was won a diversity award in 2021, awarded by the CHAOSS Project.

We will continue to work hard to make our events diverse and inclusive, including cdCon 2022, happening June 7 – 8, in Austin Texas and virtually.

We are very happy to announce we have awarded a ⭐️Gold⭐️ D&I Badge to @CDeliveryFdn for their attention to and prioritization of diversity and inclusion at this year's #cdCon. Congratulations! ✨ (Read more about our D&I Badging Initiative here https://t.co/j48cFt29Ik)
— CHAOSS Project (@CHAOSSproj) February 3, 2021

(she)DF

The (she)DF had its first meeting in February 2021.

This initiative is the CDF’s first of what I believe—and hope—will be many more exclusive spaces for underrepresented community members. Everyone deserves a space where they feel welcome, comfortable, and safe.

Join the LinkedIn Group

3. Projects: Cultivate growth & adoption of open source projects

cdCon co-located events

Three successful events were co-located with cdCon 2021:

GitOps Summit on June 22, co-hosted with the CNCF (3,067 registrants)
Spinnaker Summit, June 22-24 (2,094 registrants)
Jenkins Contributor Summit, June 25 (1,563 registrants)

SupplyChainSecurityCon

On October 11, 2021, the CNCF and the CDF co-hosted SupplyChainSecurityCon in co-location with KubeCon North America. It was a successful event with 566 attendees, who were overall were happy with the content.

Watch recorded talks on YouTube and view the event’s transparency report by the CNCF.

New Projects

We welcomed two new projects to the CDF this year. The first one was Shipwright, a framework to build container images on Kubernetes. More recently, the Technical Oversight Committee approved CDEvents, which brings our total number of projects to eight. View all projects.

CDF Landscape

This fall, Kara de la Marck worked with the community to revamp the CDF Landscape. They added too many new projects to count!

Visit the Landscape page to interact with it and to add your project.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC)

the CD Foundation was selected as a Google Summer of Code Mentor Organization. And we’re proud to say it was a huge success. Thank you to the community members to led this initiative and to the participating students.

Hacktoberfest

Five of our projects participated in Hacktoberfest 2021 this October: Jenkins, Jenkins X, Ortelius, Screwdriver and Tekton.

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software when everyone is encouraged to support open source communities.

Reminder: you can contribute to open source year-round.

Blog

We published 103 blog posts this year, compared to 170 last year, but maintained over 2,000 page views. Read all blog posts.

Memberships and Renewals

In 2021, the CD Foundation acquired six new members, including one Premier Member: AWS; and five General Members: Aspen Mesh, Dynatrace, Oracle, Ozone and Testlio.

CD Foundation Members

In total, the CD Foundation now has 40 members. View all Members

In addition to the arrival of AWS, two other companies, Red Hat and Armory, upgraded their membership to Premier.

And the General Member Announcements can be viewed here:

2022 and Beyond

We’ve put together a strategy document for 2022. View the CDF 2022 Strategy (PDF).