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Nov 14
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How do we measure the growth of CD Foundation projects and their communities?

By Blog, Community

Written by Tracy Miranda, CloudBees director of open source community and member of the CDF governing board

The CD Foundation (CDF) recently shared its 9 Strategic Goals. The second on the list is “Cultivate Growth of Projects.” This goal naturally leads us to ask ourselves the question: how do we measure the growth of our projects to know we are being successful?

There are many dimensions to open source projects. In order to sustain a project much more than code is required. The CDF helps with multiple essential services for project growth and sustenance. One of my favourite services is the CDF devstats site, which provides a wealth of data around the projects. CDF devstats, which is based on the CNCF devstats, gives indicators on community health and contributor statistics. 

Example from Tekton, one of many dashboards and data sets available:

Sometimes we have distorted views of how well projects are doing – this can be down to a few things such as hype or public sentiment around a project. Sometimes newer projects are viewed as doing better than older projects. It is important to have a sense of how well your project is doing. While there are lots of different ways to do it, one method I really like is looking at the number of individual developers contributing to a project. 

With CDF devstats I am able to take a snapshot of that data, and then see how the CDF projects stacked up against CNCF graduated projects. 

The chart here shows a visualization of average developer contributions to each project based on data from the past one year. There are many caveats with the data. E.g. Which repos are included for each project may not be strictly equivalent. But what I like about it is that at a high level it gives an indication of the size of project contributions and how projects compare relatively. 

I also like that it is all open – so you can verify the data and process  for yourself, plus do your own analysis. 

Kubernetes, as you might expect,  is a powerhouse of a project with thousands of contributors. But actually Jenkins stacks up nicely in comparison with a healthy number of contributions – which is all the more significant considering it is a 15 year old project. Sustaining and growing community contributions year-on-year for 15 years is an incredible achievement. The other CDF projects, Spinnaker, Jenkins X and Tekton, are much newer but also coming along quite nicely. See this repo for links to data. 

For me this is a nice snapshot to say we’re off to a good start here at CDF. Individual project growth will come down to each project’s community – but CDF will be working to provide key services and some of the less fun grunt stuff so project leaders can better focus on the important efforts of community building.

Nov 13
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The CD Interactive Landscape is Live

By Blog, Staff

By Tracy Ragan, CEO DeployHub, Inc. and CDF Board Member

Good news!  The CD Interactive Landscape has been made public by the CD Foundation. You can find it at https://landscape.cd.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.

Who is the CD Foundation?  The CD Foundation (CDF) serves as the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing projects for continuous integration and continuous delivery. The concept of the CDF was started by CloudBees and quickly accepted by thought leadership companies such as Google, CapitalOne, CircleCI, JFrog, IBM, Netflix, Salesforce, Huawei, DeployHub, Armory, WhiteSource, GitLab and others. 

Why is the CD Interactive Landscape important?  In today’s hybrid environment of both legacy and modern development platforms, there are hundreds of tools that help streamline the movement of code from development through production. There is a misconception that there is such a thing as a continuous delivery solution.  However, according to the CDF, CD is defined as:

“CD is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that it can be reliably released at any time. The rise of microservices and cloud native architectures has caused a corollary rise in continuous delivery practices. This is related to CI/CD that includes Continuous Integration (CI) — the practice of merging all developer working copies to a shared mainline several times a day.”

One of the primary goals of the CDF is to help drive the adoption of this practice. The practice relies on a set of tools to orchestrate, automate, configure, track and secure the Continuous Delivery approach. The CD Interactive Landscape is a tool for understanding the roles of each solution as defined by their core competency.

The CD Interactive Landscape is not a static document.  It is intended to be expanded upon by the community of open source projects and commercial solutions that make continuous delivery possible.

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 and JenkinsX. 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 at: https://github.com/cdfoundation/cdf-landscape.

For a deeper dive on the landscape, view my presentation from CD Summit/KubeCon2019

Oct 17
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CD Foundation’s Governing Board Unveils 9 Strategic Goals

By Blog, Staff

Written by Tracy Miranda, CloudBees director of open source community and member of the CDF governing board

The CD Foundation is about 6 months old and many of the early days have been spent discussing where we will as a community focus our efforts over the next year. CDF is in a unique position as a vendor-neutral body at the heart of an industry rapidly figuring out how to deliver software better and faster. With that in mind it was important to the governing board to come up with specific goals where we should focus our efforts. 

The CD Foundation governing board went through a very collaborative process to figure out what these should be. This included speaking to those who already have a lot of experience in the CI/CD space. A personal highlight of the process for me was a face-to-face at DevOps World where we had the honor of getting feedback from Jez Humble, co-author of the Continuous Delivery Book itself and Jayne Groll, Head of the DevOps Institute.

jenkins world
CDF Board Brainstorm session at DevOps World | Jenkins World August 2019 (Photo credit: Tara Hernandez)

After many discussions, the Governing Board agreed and ratified the goals in early October. Here is the list of the 9 strategic goals that will map to specific initiatives in our program plan for 2019/2020.

  1. Drive continuous delivery adoption
  2. Cultivate growth & adoption of CDF projects
  3. Foster tool interoperability
  4. Champion diversity & inclusion in our communities
  5. Foster community relations
  6. Grow the membership base
  7. Create value for all members
  8. Promote security as a first class citizen
  9. Expand into emerging technology areas

These goals are shared in no particular order or ranking. These goals are also not static every year and meant to evolve over time with input from the community. There is a lot to say about each goal including why each one matters, not just to the foundation but also to the wider CI/CD community. Over the next few weeks I will share a post on each goal and go into the why, what, how, where & who. Plus I’ll also share details of how you can join in to help us meet those goals! 

Get involved with the CD Foundation!

Memberships:
Membership Inquiries

Project Questions:
info@cd.foundation

PR/Events:
pr@cd.foundation

Newsletter:
Stay Connected

Twitter:
@CDeliveryFdn

Oct 11
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CD Foundation is participating in Outreachy!

By Blog, Staff

Outreachy is a program for open source internships that specifically targets people in demographics that are underrepresented in tech. Since 2010 Outreachy has had over 400 participants making contributions to open source projects. Outreachy is one of the most effective programs for improving the diversity of open source communities. For those familiar with Google Summer of Code, Outreachy follows a very similar format. 

The Continuous Delivery Foundation is a neutral home for the next generation of continuous delivery collaboration. We know that the greater number of diverse voices we have collaborating, the more effective we are as a community. Which is why we are thrilled to be participating in Outreachy for this upcoming round. 

Three of the CD Foundation projects: Jenkins, Jenkins X and Tekton are offering Outreachy internship projects. The Jenkins project has participated in the previous 2 rounds of Outreachy, having a total of 4 Outreachy interns working with the community on the Jenkins Audit Log Plugin. Jenkins mentor Matt Sicker shares in this post “Outreachy has helped open my eyes to the struggles that developers from around the world are dealing with which can be improved upon to help expand our communities. For example, many countries do not have reliable internet or electricity, so the use of synchronous videoconferencing and other heavyweight, synchronous processes common to more corporate-style development are inadequate in this international context.”

In that way Outreachy is also beneficial to the mentors participating. The actual tech contributions are a bonus side effect. Jenkins participates in the program with no expectation that the interns remain part of the community – but takes a wider, long term view that this generally improves open source and tech communities as a whole. Tracy Miranda, Outreachy coordinator for the Jenkins project says “As of this year I know of 2 Outreachy alumni (non-Jenkins projects) who were hired by my employer and both mention the Outreachy program as an important stepping stone in their career journeys.”

Here are the details of this round’s CD Foundation projects which we are looking for interns for. Please help us spread the word. 

Jenkins

Jenkins X

Tekton

Kara de la Marck, the Jenkins X Outreachy coordinator can personally speak to the benefits of the program: “Outreachy is a fantastic mentoring program that helps to onboard new contributors to a project and to open source more generally. Many participants go on to become long term contributors to open source. As an alumna, I have carried forward a deep appreciation of open source as an enabler of global collaboration, technological innovation, and community. I’m incredibly happy to welcome Outreachy participants to Jenkins X.”

Please help us spread the word, and we look forward to working with Outreachy interns and welcoming them into our community.

Oct 10
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Announcing the CDF Security SIG

By Blog, Staff

By Kay Williams

Security SIG Chair

10/4/2019

Hey everyone, I am excited to announce the formation of the Security SIG –  the CD Foundation’s first Special Interest Group (SIG)! The Security SIG began as a lightning talk at the first CD Summit in Barcelona this past May, and progressed to a formal proposal in August. In September it was adopted by the Technical Operating Committee (TOC).

The charter for the Security SIG is to provide a neutral home for discussion around designs, specifications, code and processes to enable security across the software supply chain. Topics of interest include the following:

  • Observability – enabling actions performed while writing code, compiling, testing, and distributing software to be manifest and verifiable.
  • Policy – enabling consumers of software to specify and implement policy over consumed software.
  • Inventory – enabling administrators to inventory and audit software used within their organizations.
  • Runtime Security– enabling detection and prevention of software tampering at runtime.
  • Vulnerability Communication – providing mechanisms for breaches in the integrity of software to be communicated and remediated.
  • Vulnerability Recovery – providing mechanisms for consumers to recover from compromised or untrusted software.

Membership in the Security SIG is open to the public. Here are some details:

Communication

Meetings

All are welcome to join the mailing list and attend meetings. We look forward to building a more secure future together!

Sincerely,

Kay

Jun 12
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CDF Openness Guidelines

By Blog, Staff

CDF is an open source technical community where technical project collaboration, discussions, and decision-making should be open and transparent. Please see our CDF TOC principles, for more background on CDF values.

Design, discussions, and decision-making around technical topics of CDF projects should occur in public view such as via GitHub issues and pull requests, public docs, public mailing lists, conference calls at which anyone may participate (and which are normally published afterward on YouTube), and in-person meetings events. This includes all SIGs, working groups, and other forums where portions of the community meet.

This is particularly important in light of the Linux Foundation’s Statement on the Huawei Entity List Ruling. (Note that CDF is part of the Linux Foundation.) Our technical community operates openly and in public which affords us exceptions to regulations other closed organizations may have to address differently. This open, public technical collaboration is also critical to our community’s success as we navigate competitive and shifting industry dynamics. Openness is particularly important in any discussions involving encryption since encryption technologies can be subject to Export Administration Regulations.

If you have questions or concerns about these guidelines, I encourage you to discuss it with your company’s legal counsel and/or to email info@cd.foundation.

Thank you.

Mar 12
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Jenkins X joins the CDF

By Blog, Staff

By James Strachan, Co-founder of Jenkins X and Distinguished Engineer, CloudBees

This is a contributed blog from co-founder of Jenkins X on the project becoming apart of CDF. Originally published on the Jenkins X Blog.

We are thrilled to announce that Jenkins X will be joining the Continuous Delivery Foundation as one of the founding projects. The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) is a brand new sub-foundation of the Linux Foundation and will be dedicated to advancing the practice of continuous delivery and nurturing an ecosystem of interoperable tools for software delivery.

Jenkins X is just over a year old but has been growing rapidly as the CI/CD solution for modern cloud applications on Kubernetes. Jenkins X automates CI+CD for Kubernetes using the best of breed OSS tools such as Jenkins, Tekton, Prow, Skaffold, Kaniko and Helm. The CDF will be a sibling foundation to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) which hosts Kubernetes amongst others. CDF will have its first event, CDF Summit, on May 20th alongside KubeCon Barcelona. We always love to work closely with other communities, and this will continue at scale within the CDF.

“I’m really excited to see the formation of the CDF – it’s starting with some of the most popular best-of-breed open source tools in the CI/CD space,” said James Strachan, co-founder of Jenkins X and distinguished engineer, CloudBees. “I’m looking forward to increased collaboration between us all to help accelerate the open source CI/CD landscape.”

Jenkins X started life under the Jenkins umbrella. In CDF, Jenkins X will be a distinct project from Jenkins which means some changes, such as having a Jenkins X Technical Steering Committee. These changes will happen gradually as we transition to CDF over the coming weeks. Normal development work will continue as usual.

We are excited about all the new possibilities that being part of the CDF will bring. We look forward to new initiatives and welcoming everybody to get involved with the project.

Mar 12
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Jenkins is Joining the Continuous Delivery Foundation

By Blog, Staff

By Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Creator of Jenkins and CTO at CloudBees

This is a contributed blog from the creator of Jenkins on the project becoming part of CDF. Originally published on the Jenkins Blog.

Linux Foundation, along with CloudBees, Google, and a number of other companies, today launched a new open source software foundation called Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF.) The CDF believes in the power of continuous delivery, and it aims to foster and sustain the ecosystem of open-source, vendor neutral projects.

Jenkins contributors have decided that our project should join this new foundation. This discussion happened over the time span of years, actually, but a relatively succinct summary of the motivations are here.

Now, as an user, what does this mean?

  • First, there will be no big disruption/discontinuity. The same people are still here, no URL is changing, releases will come out like they’ve always been. We make the decisions the same way we’ve been making, and pull requests land the same way. Changes will happen continuously over the period of time.
  • This is yet another testament to the maturity and the importance of the Jenkins project in this space. With a quarter million Jenkins running around the globe, it’s truly rocking the world of software development from IoT to games, cloud native webapps to machine learning projects. It makes Jenkins such an obvious, safe choice for anyone seeking open heterogeneous DevOps strategy.
  • The CDF creates a level playing field that is well-understood to organized contributors, which translate into more contributors, which results in a better Jenkins, faster. Over the past years, the Jenkins project has been steadily growing more structures that provide this clarity, and this is the newest step on this trajectory.
  • Any serious dev teams are combining multiple tools and services to cover the whole software development spectrum. A lot of work gets reinvented in those teams to integrate those tools together. Jenkins will be working more closely with other projects under the umbrella of the CDF, which should result in better aligned software with less overlap.
  • Our users are practitioners trying to improve the software development process in their organizations. They get that CI/CD/automation unlocks the productivity that their organizations need, but that’s not always obvious to their organizations as a whole. So our users often struggle to get the necessary support. The CDF will advocate for the practice of Continuous Delivery, and because it’s not coming from a vendor or a project, it will reach the people who can lend that support.

So I hope you can see why we are so excited about this!

In fact, for us, this is an idea that we’ve been cooking for close to two years. I don’t think I’m exaggerating much to say the whole idea of the CDF started from the Jenkins project.

A lot of people have done a lot of work behind the scene to make this happen. But a few people played such instrumental roles that I have to personally thank them. Chris Aniszczyk for his patience and persistence, Tyler Croy for cooking and evolving the idea, and Tracy Miranda for making an idea into a reality.

Mar 12
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Spinnaker Sets Sail to the Continuous Delivery Foundation

By Blog, Staff

By Andy Glover, Director of Delivery Engineering, at Netflix

This is a contributed Blog from our Premier founding member Netflix on the donation of Spinnaker to CDF. Originally Posted on the Netflix Technology Blog.

Since releasing Spinnaker to the open source community in 2015, the platform has flourished with the addition of new cloud providers, triggers, pipeline stages, and much more. A myriad new features, improvements, and innovations have been added by an ever growing, actively engaged community. Each new innovation has been a step towards an even better Continuous Delivery platform that facilitates rapid, reliable, safe delivery of flexible assets to pluggable deployment targets.

Over the last year, Netflix has improved overall management of Spinnaker by enhancing community engagement and transparency. At the Spinnaker Summit in 2018, we announced that we had adopted a formalized project governance plan with Google. Moreover, we also realized that we’ll need to share the responsibility of Spinnaker’s direction as well as yield a level of long-term strategic influence over the project so as to maintain a healthy, engaged community. This means enabling more parties outside of Netflix and Google to have a say in the direction and implementation of Spinnaker.

A strong, healthy, committed community benefits everyone; however, open source projects rarely reach this critical mass. It’s clear Spinnaker has reached this special stage in its evolution; accordingly, we are thrilled to announce two exciting developments.

First, Netflix and Google are jointly donating Spinnaker to the newly created Continuous Delivery Foundation (or CDF), which is part of the Linux Foundation. The CDF is a neutral organization that will grow and sustain an open continuous delivery ecosystem, much like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (or CNCF) has done for the cloud native computing ecosystem. The initial set of projects to be donated to the CDF are Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, and Tekton. Second, Netflix is joining as a founding member of the CDF.  Continuous Delivery powers innovation at Netflix and working with other leading practitioners to promote Continuous Delivery through specifications is an exciting opportunity to join forces and bring the benefits of rapid, reliable, and safe delivery to an even larger community.

Spinnaker’s success is in large part due to the amazing community of companies and people that use it and contribute to it. Donating Spinnaker to the CDF will strengthen this community. This move will encourage contributions and investments from additional companies who are undoubtedly waiting on the sidelines. Opening the doors to new companies increases the innovations we’ll see in Spinnaker, which benefits everyone.

Donating Spinnaker to the CDF doesn’t change Netflix’s commitment to Spinnaker, and what’s more, current users of Spinnaker are unaffected by this change. Spinnaker’s previously defined governance policy remains in place. Overtime, new stakeholders will emerge and play a larger, more formal role in shaping Spinnaker’s future. The prospects of an even healthier and more engaged community focused on Spinnaker and the manifold benefits of Continuous Delivery is tremendously exciting and we’re looking forward to seeing it continue to flourish.  

Mar 12
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Introducing the Continuous Delivery Foundation, the new home for Tekton, Jenkins, Jenkins X and Spinnaker

By Blog, Staff

By Dan Lorenc and Kim Lewandowski, DevOps at Google Cloud

This is a contributed blog from our Premier founding member Google on the donation of Tekton and Spinnaker to CDF. Originally published on the Google Open Source Blog.

We’re excited to announce that Google is a founding member of the newly formed Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Continuous delivery (CD) is a critical part of modern software development and DevOps practices, and we’re excited to collaborate in a vendor-neutral foundation with other industry leaders.

We’re also thrilled to announce the contribution of two projects as part of our membership: Tekton, and in collaboration with Netflix, Spinnaker. These donations will enter alongside Jenkins and Jenkins X, providing an exciting portfolio of projects for the CDF to expand upon.

Continuous Delivery Foundation

Currently, the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tool landscape is highly fragmented. As companies migrate to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure, tooling decisions become increasingly complicated and difficult. DevOps practitioners constantly seek guidance on software delivery best practices and how to secure their software supply chains but gathering this information can be difficult. Enter the CDF.

The CDF is about more than just code. Modern application development brings new challenges around security and compliance. This foundation will work to define the practices and guidelines that, together with tooling, will help application developers everywhere deliver better and more secure software at speed.

At a foundation level, the CDF will help make CI/CD tooling easier. And at a project level, Tekton helps address complexity problems at their core. We will team up with the open source community and industry leaders to design and build the critical pieces common to CI/CD systems.

Tekton

Tekton is a set of shared, open source components for building CI/CD systems. It provides a flexible, extensible workflow that accommodates deployment to Kubernetes, VMs, bare metal, mobile or even emerging use cases.

The project’s goal is to provide industry specifications for pipelines, workflows, source code access and other primitives. It modernizes the continuous delivery control plane by leveraging all of the built-in scaling, reliability, and extensibility advantages of Kubernetes, and moves software deployment logic there. Tekton was initially built as a part of Knative, but given its stand-alone power, and ability to deploy to a variety of targets, we’ve decided to separate its functionality out into a new project.

Today, Tekton includes primitives for pipeline definition, source code access, artifact management, and test execution. The project roadmap includes adding support for results and event triggering in the coming months. We also plan to work with CI/CD vendors to build out an ecosystem of components that will allow you to use Tekton with existing tools like Jenkins X, Knative and others.

Spinnaker

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform originally created by Netflix and jointly led by Netflix and Google. It is typically used in organizations at scale, where DevOps teams support multiple development teams, and has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams and in millions of deployments.

Spinnaker is a multi-component system that conceptually aligns with Tekton, and that includes many features important to making continuous delivery reliable, including support for advanced deployment strategies, and Kayenta, an open source canary analysis service.

Given Google’s significant contributions to both Tekton and Spinnaker, we’re very pleased to see them become part of the same foundation. Spinnaker’s large user community has a great deal of experience in the continuous delivery domain, and joining the CDF provides a great opportunity to share that expertise with the broader community.

Next Steps

To learn more about the CDF, listen to this week’s Kubernetes Podcast from Google, where the guest is Tracy Miranda, Director of Open Source Community from our partner CloudBees.

If you’d like to participate in the future of Tekton, Spinnaker, or the CDF, please join us in Barcelona, Spain, on May 20th at the Continuous Delivery Summit ahead of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon EU. If you can’t make it, don’t worry, as there will be many opportunities to get involved and become a part of the community.

We look forward to working with the continuous delivery community on shaping the next wave of CI/CD innovations, alignments, and improvements, no matter where your applications are delivered to.

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