2022 Annual Report

by CD Foundation Team

It is our pleasure to share the Continuous Delivery Foundation 2022 Annual Report which aims to highlight the achievements of our community and our projects and summarize the key initiatives driven by the community. The report captures some of the key steps the community started taking in 2022 to make Continuous Delivery (CD) accessible to all and make the CDF the place to collaborate on the future of CD. 

Before we dive into the details, we would like to recognize the efforts of our community during these challenging times. As we all know, open source communities are highly social organisms and the communities thrive when we meet with fellow community members in person and spend quality time discussing our challenges, ideas, and passions about the projects we contribute to, communities we are engaged in and the technologies we are interested in. Additionally, we spend time chatting about our personal interests and our lives. However, we didn’t have a chance to do this in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. Even with all these difficulties, our community continued to make impactful contributions and drive the CD forward which helped us as a community to start 2022 in a good way. Thank you to the CDF Community!

In June 2022, we also welcomed Fatih Degirmenci, a long-time CDF community member, as the new Executive Director of the CDF. Fatih was involved in a few community initiatives such as the Interoperability and Software Supply Chain Special Interest Groups and served on the CDF Technical Oversight Committee. His goals include contributing to the CDF community initiatives that are evolving the CD space, helping grow the CDF community, and attracting new organizations to support the vision and mission of the CDF.

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 CD ecosystem. The summary minutes of their meetings are published on GitHub for you to read.

The CDF Governing Board held elections in July 2022 and 5 newly elected members joined the CDF Governing Board, including 2 Committer/Contributor representatives. 

• Andrea Frittoli, IBM, GB Committer/Contributor Representative 
• Brad McCoy, Basiq, GB Committer/Contributor Representative
• Gerard McMahon, Fidelity Investments, GB General Member Representative 
• Justin Abrahms, eBay, GB End User Representative
• Lori Lorusso, JFrog, CDF Outreach Committee Chair

In December 2022, Stephen Chin from JFrog was reelected as the Governing Board Chair after serving for two years.

“When I became the CDF Governing Board Chair in 2020, I said the need for continuous delivery was evident and is an essential part of every company’s digital transformation strategy. The tremendous potential I saw in the vibrant community and projects that the CDF supports is flourishing. 

“Since I came on board, the foundation acquired three new open source projects: Shipwright, CDEvents, and most recently Pyrsia. These new projects bring new capabilities to the CDF and enable our community members to work on additional topics that are key to CD; building container images on Kubernetes, developing a common specification for CD events, and securing your open source supply chain.

“In 2023, we expect the CDF community to continue shaping the future of CD by making impactful contributions and closely collaborating with our sister communities. We are also very excited for our upcoming event, cdCon + GitOpsCon 2023, which is co-hosted by CNCF and brings the communities, end users, and vendors of CD and GitOps together to foster collaboration, discussion, and knowledge sharing.”

Stephen Chin, JFrog, Governing Board Chair

Technical Oversight Committee

The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) is the team responsible for the technical vision, project oversight, and technical community decisions for the CDF. There were two elections in 2022 and 5 new members were elected to the TOC. Oleg Nenashev from Dynatrace was reelected as the TOC Chair in August 2022.

Five new TOC members were elected in 2022. From left to right, Tracy Ragan (DeployHub), Robert Reeves (Liquibase), Melissa McKay (JFrog), Justin Abrahms (eBay), and Emil Bäckmark (Ericsson).

Thank you, Oleg, for serving as the CDF TOC Chair. You’ve supported the community through thick and thin and we look forward to continue working with you as you contribute to CDF projects.

In January 2023 Andrea Frittoli was elected as the new TOC Chair.

“I’m honored and humbled to have been elected chair of the Continuous Delivery Foundation Technical Oversight Committee. 

“I have the pleasure of serving as chair to a great TOC and I’m confident that together with the projects teams, special interest groups and member companies we can realize the CD Foundation’s mission to ‘foster and sustain the ecosystem of open-source, vendor-neutral projects through collaborations and interoperability.’

“As chair, I will foster transparency and collaboration across projects and SIGs, as well as towards other groups such as the CNCF, the OpenSSF, and more. I will also promote interoperability between tools in the CD space as an area of focus for the TOC (to be included in the public roadmap).”

Andrea Frittoli, IBM, TOC Chair

Outreach Committee

In June 2022, we welcomed Lori Lorusso of JFrog as the newly elected CDF Outreach Committee Chair. Lori will lead the Outreach Committee, which is responsible for overall marketing and outreach for CDF projects, ultimately managing and guiding CDF marketing for the CDF Governing Board.

“It’s been an exciting six months for me as the CDF Outreach Committee Chair. Working with Fatih, Michelle, and Roxanne is extremely rewarding and their drive and passion for the CDF are evident in the care and thoughtfulness they put into every aspect of running the foundation. 

“As committee chair, my focus has been on communication and better serving our community. To date, we’ve collaborated with ambassadors, projects, members, and end users to refocus our attention on the tools and strategies shared within our community that make the CDF an integral part of the developer ecosphere. 

“I believe the CDF is in an amazing position to reinvigorate membership and grow participation within the organization. There are many great initiatives planned for the Outreach Committee in 2023 and can’t wait to work with everyone to achieve new heights!”

Lori Lorusso, JFrog, Outreach Chair

New Outreach Committee Initiatives

The CDF Outreach Committee was busy during the second half of 2022, kicking off various initiatives as well as working on increasing collaboration within the CDF and toward the project communities. One of the key steps the Outreach Committee took was to hold a series of listening sessions with the committee, and project representatives to find out more ways we can support their individual initiatives and broaden participation in the committee. This is the path forward to make sure the CDF supports its project communities, its Special Interest Groups (SIG), member companies, contributors, and end users in the best possible way. 

One of the ways we are bringing our communities together is by pairing the Outreach Committee with the CDF Ambassadors, key enablers for our community, to ensure the outreach initiatives are handled in a coordinated manner. Project representatives and the chair of the CDF Ambassadors, Garima Bajpai, will join the CDF Outreach Committee as voting members, subject to the approval of the amended CDF Charter by the CDF Governing Board.

Another initiative the CDF Outreach Committee started late last year was The CD Pipeline – Continuously Delivering Software from A to Z in collaboration with our friends at Techstrong.tv. In 2022, three episodes focusing on three of the CDF Projects, Tekton, Jenkins, and Pyrsia were published. Future episodes will focus on general and emerging CD topics like interoperability, security, and more.

2022 Goals

The Governing Board set three goals for the CD Foundation in 2022. They were:

• Engage the end user ecosystem and drive continuous delivery adoption
• Cultivate growth and adoption of our open source projects portfolio
• Improve the state-of-the-art for continuous delivery in the industry through open practices

The CDF Community, our special interest groups and our projects worked on contributing to these goals throughout the year and we had many great achievements that contributed to meeting the goals.

Events

As noted earlier, in-person events are crucial for communities to come together and share their achievements, meet with the users of the projects they are developing, and chart the path for the future.

In 2022, CDF hosted five in-person events, including our flagship event cdCon.

cdCon 2022

For the first time since its inception, the CD Foundation’s flagship event, cdCon, gathered in-person and virtually for the third-annual cdCon on June 7 – 8, 2022 in Austin, Texas, United States. We were thrilled to see so many of our community members face-to-face and proud to be able to offer the event’s amazing content to a virtual audience. 

The event was a success with 53 sessions with content that spanned the entire CD ecosystem, from workflow orchestration, configuration management, continuous testing, observability, security, MLOps, release automation, and more. The event sparked good discussions and feedback within the community. In addition to cdCon, we were pleased to host 5 co-located events, including CDEvents Community Summits, and an informal Spinnaker Meetup.

Feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive, and 77% provided a Good or Excellent rating. The top three reasons that people attended cdCon were to attend technical breakouts sessions (54%), network (33%), and present (10%). 

You can watch the session recordings on our CDF Youtube Channel and read the cdCon transparency report.

CDEventsCon

CDEvents is one of the youngest projects within the CD Foundation, created by the CDF Community to create a common specification for CD events. As part of our efforts to enable interoperability in the complete software production ecosystem and increase awareness, we hosted CDEventsCon on May 17, 2022, in Valencia, Spain as an in-person event, co-located with KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe. You can view the event wrap-up here.

“CDEventsCon in Valencia was a great event where we got to hear about many aspects of event-driven CI/CD architectures and how CDEvents fit into those. We had good representation from many different open-source projects and organizations. The vibe around CDEvents was very positive and we built the community stronger.”

Emil Bäckmark Ericsson, Co-chair of SIG Events and CDEvents Project

CD Mini Summit

Our next stop was Dublin, Ireland where the Open Source Summit Europe 2022 took place. This was a great opportunity for us to host an in-person event, CD Mini Summit, to bring the community members together. The event took place on September 12, 2022, and had talks around CDF projects as well as hot topics such as software supply chain security. The event wrap-up is available here.

Spinnaker Summit and CD Summit

The last stop for the CDF community in 2022 was Detroit, the United States, where KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA took place, and what an exciting week that was with 2 great events, Spinnaker Summit 2022 and CD Summit!

Spinnaker Summit is an annual event that brings together a global community of collaborators, focused on the future of Spinnaker, the open source continuous delivery platform. The event took place on October 24-25, 2022 with the first day being the main event day with many interesting presentations and panel sessions. The community used the second day for Special Interest Group meetings (Documentation, Kubernetes, Platform, and Cloud) and workshops to discuss and plan the future of Spinnaker. The session recordings are available on the CDF Youtube Channel.

Publications

Our blog features many posts about the current and future state of Continuous Delivery. In addition to that, we published a whitepaper and the latest State of CD Report.

CDEvents Whitepaper

The CDEvents project has published its first whitepaper called: CDEvents: The Next Evolution in CI/CD Technologies. It describes the newest CDF projects CDEvents and focuses on how to evolve DevOps pipelines to be more scalable, robust, measurable, and visible, using a technology-agnostic solution to provide interoperability.

State of Continuous Delivery Report

A key function of CDF is providing vendor-neutral data on key DevOps and development metrics showing where continuous delivery stands in 2022 and beyond. The Continuous Delivery Report Series started last year; this is the third report in the series. 

This year, the focus was State of CD Report: The Evolution of Software Delivery Performance.

Key findings include:

• As of Q1 2022, less than a quarter (23%) of developers are not involved in any DevOps-related activities, indicating continued growth in the adoption of practices that increase an organization’s ability to deliver software at high velocity.
• 47% of developers use either continuous integration or deployment but only one in five use both continuous integration and deployment approaches to automate all building, testing, and deployment of code to production.
• There is an increase in DevOps adoption in every development sector. Mobile app development has now even leapfrogged desktop development, such is its shift in embracing DevOps approaches.

All our reports are available here: https://cd.foundation/reports/ 

Technical Initiatives and Projects

Technical Initiatives

The CD Foundation has five Special Interest Groups (SIG), that cover different aspects of CD.

Each of these groups made great progress in 2022, contributing to the mission and vision of the CDF. 

Here are some highlights:

• MLOps SIG released its roadmap for 2022 during November 2022 and it can be found in its GitHub repository here.
• Interoperability SIG continued looking into different aspects of the interoperability within the CD ecosystem and started working on various topics such as intent-based pipelines and abstractions.
• Best Practices SIG launched the CD Best Practices website during cdCon, 2022 in June 2022. Additionally, the community started discussing a new initiative, CDF Reference Architecture, to make CD accessible to all during the summer which the community expects to put more effort into in 2023.
• Events SIG continued its work around the vocabulary and closely collaborated with other SIGs to identify further collaboration opportunities.
• Software Supply Chain SIG was approved to be formed by the CDF TOC in early 2022. Even though is the youngest SIG within the CDF, the community members did a lot of work around the various aspects of Supply Chain Security and its relation to the CD. It announced the formation of a workstream, Supply Chain Maturity Model, in September 2022.

Projects

The CD Foundation is home to nine CD Projects, including Jenkins that graduated in 2020. In 2022, the CDF community and our projects had significant achievements leading to new versions, contributors, and innovation and we welcomed two new projects to the CDF as incubating-level projects; CDEvents and Pyrsia.

Below is a high-level list of some of these notable achievements per project. 

Tekton Graduation

Tekton graduated from CDF, joining Jenkins on the list of graduated CDF projects. (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.)

Congratulations to the Tekton project for all their hard work and thank you to the CD Foundation’s TOC for their guidance and support.

Project Highlights

Here are some of this year’s highlights from each of our open source projects.

CDEvents

• Project was officially announced as an incubating-level project
• Whitepaper was published
• First project version was released
  • Specification
  • Golang SDK
  • Support for 2 of the DORA metrics
• Hosted CDEventsCon and CDEvents Community Summit

Jenkins

• UI modernization with new themes, icons, menus, forms, and buttons
• Platform modernization
  • Jenkins now requires Java 11, to ensure that it stays up to date with user needs. This update was tested repeatedly prior to the release, and brings a suite of upgrades to the Jenkins platform. This includes utilizing Java 11 as a baseline for plugin development.
  • Jenkins now fully supports Java 17
• Security fixes for Jenkins core and plugins
• Contributions are a result of the community and collaboration with various projects throughout the year
  • She Code Africa, Google Summer of Code, Hacktoberfest, CDF, and sponsors
• 814 Pull Requests merged. 100+ new contributors during Hacktoberfest.
• See more of Jenkins 2022 Recap here.

Jenkins X

• The TOC was formed
• GSOC participation (final report one and two)
• New maintainers joined the project

Ortelius

• Project stats for the year
  • 254 Google Group Members
  • 718 LinkedIn Followers
  • 264 GitHub Stars
  • 115  GitHub Forks
  • 203 Total Pull Requests in 2022
• Received a $75K grant from XRP Ledger to explore the creation of immutable SBOMs with an audit trail
• The project participated in 16 presentations at various conferences. Saim Safder earned a Gold Level Ambassador badge, Brad McCoy, Utkarsh Sharma, and Sergio Canales all earned Silver level Champion badges for their technical work and number of pull requests completed. 

Pyrsia

• Built the working version of Pyrsia decentralized network
• New incubation project under CD Foundation
• Participated in CDSummit/KubeCon
• Released easy-to-use installer versions to enable quick adoption to run Pyrsia nodes

Screwdriver

• 550+ Pull Requests Merged in 2022.
• AWS Cloud Native Builds: Screwdriver supports running builds in AWS Public Cloud in addition to any on-premise build clusters.
• Usability Improvements
  • Made edits to Build Pipelines with external config a 2-step UI-driven process in order to prevent accidental removals.
  • User Pipeline Collections enhancements to support sorting and visualize the latest build data.
• Architecture Improvements for performance and reliability.
  • New micro-service for SCM webhook processing.
  • New mico-service to handle build artifact processing.

Shipwright

• Project stats for the year
  • 500+ GitHub Stars
  • 260+ Pull Requests
  • 4 Releases
• Shipwright at CDCon/KubeCon/Hacktoberfest, we also hosted our first Shipwright Community Summit at NA cdCon 22.
• Community workshop around bringing Shipwright API from Alpha to Beta in 2023. See our support statement.

Spinnaker

• Hosted Spinnaker Summit 
• The TOC was rebooted

Tekton

• Security Audit completed
• Graduated from CDF
• Pipeline V1 API released
• Long-Term Support (LTS) Policy introduced and LTS releases
• Project Adopted by various open source projects, vendors and end-users

Community Enablement

One of the key achievements in 2022 was taking the “documentation-first approach” and working with the community to provide guidelines for every CDF initiative. The reason behind this was transparency, but also providing the community with all the necessary information. Over the last couple of months, more than ten guideline documents were created by the community as communal resources. All of our guidelines are available here: https://github.com/cdfoundation/foundation 

Google Summer of Code

This year, two of our CD Foundation projects, Jenkins and Jenkins X, were accepted to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC). We want to commend all of the organizers, mentors, and students for their hard work.

Hacktoberfest

For the third year in a row, the CDF and its projects participated in Hacktoberfest (a month-long celebration of open source software where everyone is encouraged to support open source communities).

Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible, admins, mentors, and contributors to the projects.

Members

We were happy to welcome eight new CDF Members in 2022. 

• Cloudsmith
• Env0
• NGINX
• Prodvana
• Salesforce
• Spacelift
• Stackhawk
• Tenable

It’s important to involve new companies in our initiatives because the CD landscape is always evolving with new technologies and better ways to be faster and safer. It’s also great to see end-users like Salesforce in the mix because they help set the example for other companies using CD technologies.

So thank you to our new and, of course, to our current and past members for sharing knowledge and innovating as an open community. We are better together!

Conclusion

During 2022, our community continued looking for answers to some of the difficult questions and tackled key topics within the CD domain, such as scalability, interoperability, security, and maturity. Additionally, the community put a lot of effort into collecting and publishing the CD Best Practices, paving the way for broader efforts to make CD accessible to all. 

Our project communities made lots of progress, implementing new key features as well as ensuring the users of the projects have the best possible experience as they continue their CD journey. But what made 2022 a year to remember was the support of the CDF Governing Board as well as the progress within the CDF Technical Oversight Committee, the CDF Outreach Committee, and the CDF Ambassadors. Finally, the support and engagement of our members are key to the success of our community and the health and sustainability of the CD Foundation. 

All in all, 2022 was a great year with achievements and progress all around and we are proud of being part of this awesome community! We entered 2023 running with the plans for cdCon 2023 and we look forward to an even greater year! Thank you!