By Fatih Degirmenci
Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) approved the formation of Special Interest Group (SIG) Interoperability January 14, 2020. SIG Interoperability aims to increase integration and interoperability across different tools and technologies in the open source CI/CD ecosystem. One of the prerequisites to achieve this is to provide a neutral forum, enabling dialog between projects and end-users so they can come together and discuss their use cases, needs, and challenges. This will allow projects and communities to explore additional collaboration opportunities and increase the visibility of ongoing work.
One of the means the SIG adapted to provide a forum for discussion is to invite representatives of project and end-user communities to regular SIG meetings so they can present what they are doing. The presentations are then followed by open discussions which allows community members to ask questions, raise concerns, and more importantly start talking with each other. However, one of the things the community noticed is the lack of shared terminology and vocabulary as the tools and technologies employ different terms to describe what is often the same thing.
This is actually not a surprising finding since there are many ways to greet someone and as humans if we do not understand the word being used we have the ability to observe body language, process tone, and even touch. These many different natural inputs allow us as humans to establish shared vocabulary upon which we have been able to build successful components relevant to our way of living and social norms of interacting.
Unfortunately for machines, this process is not so easy as we humans have to decide if we want to establish norms which we often surface when talking about machine interactions as protocols and best practices or requirements.
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) practitioners have many tools at their disposal but it is often the case that what we call a pipeline in today’s tool of choice is not called the same thing in the tool we use tomorrow. Again, we can within our sphere of influence and interaction adjust for these nuances but machines talking to one another do not have that same luxury necessarily.
These are the thoughts that made contributors to SIG to work on vocabulary and terminology as the first thing right after the SIG was approved to be formed because we believe that if we can establish a shared vocabulary across the industry in CI/CD domain, we can remove the barriers between humans so we can start tackling with getting machines to talk to each other. The way this work is envisioned to be done is to collect the existing terms used by CI/CD tools and technologies in a document, and create a mapping of the terms across projects, essentially making the Rosetta Stone for CI/CD domain. We think that we can continue on this work and look for possibilities to come up with shared vocabulary in a collaborative manner.
The document SIG is working on is available in SIG Interoperability repository on GitHub and it currently contains terms for 10 CI/CD projects as shown on the table below.
| Project | ||||||
| CircleCI | N/A | Step | Job | Workflow | Trigger | Executor |
| GitHub Actions | Action | Step | Job | Workflow | Event | Runner |
| GitLab CI/CD | N/A | Job | Stage | Pipeline | Trigger | Runner |
| Jenkins | N/A | Job | Stage | Pipeline | Trigger | Agent/Node |
| Jenkins X | N/A | Step | Stage | Pipeline | Trigger | Agent |
| Keptn | N/A | N/A | Task | Workflow | Event | Keptn-Service |
| Screwdriver | N/A | Step | Job | Pipeline | Trigger | N/A |
| Spinnaker | N/A | Task | Stage | Pipeline | Trigger | Cluster |
| Tekton | N/A | Step | Task | Pipeline | Trigger | Resource |
| Zuul | N/A | N/A | Job | Pipeline | Trigger | Node |
Due to the fact that when organizations establish CI/CD pipelines, they employ not just CI/CD tools but also Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems, Artifact Repository Managers (ARM) and so on. That’s why we included terminology for SCM tools such as Gerrit, GitHub, and GitLab and we expect to have terms used by other tools in adjacent areas collected as well.
It is important to highlight that we consider this work as still ongoing and we encourage and welcome everyone to add terminology used by the project they use and/or are involved in to the document so we have broader coverage of the tools and technologies. If you also notice that there are things that can be improved, feel free to send a pull request to CDF SIG Interoperability repository and improve the existing documentation.
