Contributed by: Andrea Frittoli, Benjamin Powell, Emil Bäckmark, and Sean Brennan
The CDEvents journey has reached another milestone as we now release version 0.4 of the specification. The main addition planned for this release was the possibility to relate events to each other—and we’re happy to say that is now achieved through the use of ‘link’ as can be seen in the section Inter-event relations below.
Other additions/updates in this release include the following:
- Artifact events with SBOM references
- Events describing operations on tickets
- Improved support for customizable events
- Events describing artifact registry operations
- Notify about skipped test case executions
- Miscellaneous documentation updates and minor corrections
- And more…
Additional information about some of those changes can be found in the sections below.
Updates to our SDKs to support the new release of the specification will come soon.
Inter-event Relations
CDEvents has defined a way to connect events of the CI/CD lifecycle. This is done by utilizing the new links feature, which allows for events to specify how they are connected in that lifecycle. This gives CDEvents users the ability to draw the events graph and also reflect the consumers of those events. Learn more
SBOM References in Artifact Events
Events related to the production of new artifacts now allow producers to include a link to the software bill of material (SBOM) of the artifact.
There is no standard that defines where or how the SBOM of an artifact should be stored. The new SBOM field in CDEvents can be used by consumers to discover and store artifact SBOMs. Learn more
Ticket-Related Events
By introducing ticket-related events, CDEvents aims to streamline the tracking of the entire lifecycle of a code change from inception to deployment, while also enabling seamless interoperability with ticketing systems.
One of the primary motivations behind this enhancement is to enhance observability, a critical aspect for both teams and businesses. With ticket events, users can access and compile metrics pertaining to tickets and the subsequent deployment of fixes or features. For instance, in the case of a bug fix, users can effortlessly trace the journey from ticket creation to the eventual deployment in production, without the need for manual data aggregation.
Furthermore, the introduction of ticket events fosters interoperability with ticketing systems, presenting opportunities to automate actions triggered by ticket updates or status transitions. With this feature, ticketing systems can seamlessly integrate with the CI/CD lifecycle, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency. Learn more
Customizable Events
Starting in v0.4, events may now include a link to a custom JSON schema. Organizations may use the schema to further refine the schema provided by CDEvents, for instance, to restrict the list of valid values or provide a schema for the otherwise unstructured custom data section.
In this release, we introduce support for custom events too. Tools that already adopt or are in the process of adding CDEvents may want to send some tool-specific events that are not suitable for the CDEvents specification. Starting in v0.4, CDEvents includes a custom events JSON schema, which allows tools to add new events with a custom event type and content. Learn more
Artifact Registry Related Events
Artifact events may be produced by build systems as well as artifact registries.
New artifact events have been introduced in this release to cover the whole lifecycle of artifacts in registries. Learn more
For a complete set of updates in this release, see the GitHub v0.4 release page.
Our Community
A big THANK YOU to all contributors to this version of the CDEvents specification, and to everyone in our community who delegate time and effort to work on our SDKs and tool implementations!
If you want to get involved in the CDEvents project, please join our community.
