Jan 14

From Jenkins: Happy New Year! 2019/2020 edition

By cdfoundation Blog, Project

Originally published in the Jenkins blog by Oleg Nenashev

Jenkins project congratulates all users and contributors with the New Year! Let’s take a look at some changes this year.

Highlights

We celebrated 15 years of Jenkins
We had first ever Governance Board and Officer elections
Jenkins project joined the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF)
We released Java 11 support in Jenkins
Jenkins X has graduated as a Jenkins sub-project and became a new project under umbrella of CDF
In October 2019 we reached the record high number of contributions: 915 unique contributors, 124 of them were first-timers
We started new special interest groups for Documentation and User Experience.
A new position of the Documentation officer was introduced to highlight an important role of documentation in the project
We ran multiple mentorship programs with 12 mentees in total: Google Summer of Code, Hacktoberfest and Outreachy

If you are interested to know more about Jenkins features introduced in 2019, stay tuned for a separate blog post about it (coming soon!).

Project updates

Highlights above do not cover all advancements we had in the project. Below you can find slides from the Jenkins contributor summit in Lisbon. There we had project updates by officers, SIG and sub-project leaders. See the slide deck to know about: Jenkins Core, Pipeline, Configuration-as-Code, Security, UX Overhaul, Jenkins Infrastructure, platform support and documentation.

Some stats and numbers

If this section seems to be too long for you, here is some infographic prepared by Tracy Miranda. As you may see, Jenkins is pretty big 🙂

Community. Over the past year we had 5433 contributors in GitHub repositories (committers, reviewers, issue submitters, etc.). We had 1892 unique committers who created 7122 pull requests and 45484 commits, bots excluded. Contributors represent 273 companies and 111 countries, 8% of contributors are recognized as independent. The most active repositories were Jenkins Core and jenkins.io. The most active month was October 2019 when we reached the record high number of contributions: 915 unique contributors, 124 of them were first-timers, thanks to Hacktoberfest!.

Jenkins core. In 2019 Jenkins core had 54 weekly and 13 LTS releases with several hundreds of notable fixes/enhancements. There was a login screen extensibility rework, many update manager and administrative monitors improvements. We also introduced support for user timezones, not speaking of emojis support 🥳. There was also a lot of housekeeping work: better APIs, codebase refresh, cleaning up static analysis warnings and removing deprecated features like Remoting CLI. The core’s components also got major updates. Only Jenkins Remoting got 11 releases with stability improvements and new features like support of inbound connections to headless Jenkins masters. There are also major incoming features like JEP-222: WebSocket Services support, UI look&feel updates, JENKINS-12548: Readonly system configuration support, Docker images for new platforms like Arm. To facilitate further changes we created a new Core pull request reviewers team and added 9 contributors there.

Plugins. There were 2654 plugin releases, and 157 NEW plugins have been hosted in the Update Center. Jenkins ecosystem got a lot of new integrations with Development and DevOps tools. Also, warm welcome back to the Scriptler Plugin which was depublished in 2017 due to security issues. If you are afraid about such plugin numbers and dependency management, there is a new Plugin Installation Manager CLI Tool which should help Jenkins users to manage plugins more efficiently.

Security. It was a hot year for the Jenkins Security Team. There were 5 security advisories for the core and 20 – for plugins. In total we disclosed 288 vulnerabilities across the project, including some backlog cleaning for unmaintained plugins. Script Security Plugin was the hottest plugin with 10 critical fixes addressing various sandbox bypass vulnerabilities. Plain text storage and unprotected credentials were the most popular vulnerability type 120 disclosures in 2019. It was made possible by hundreds of reports submitted by contributors after code surveys, special thanks to Viktor Gazdag who reported the most of the issues and became the Jenkins 2019 Security MVP (check out his story here).

Infrastructure. Got Jenkins? If so, you rely on Jenkins update centers, website and issue tracker. All these and many other services are maintained by the Jenkins Infrastructure Team. This year the team handled more than 400 requests in the bugtracker, and many other informal requests. In total, more than 30 people contributed to Jenkins infrastructure this year (website content is excluded). We also deployed 4 new services, migrated 7 services from Azure Container Service to Azure Kubernetes Service and updated many other services. More changes will happen in the next months, and we are looking for new INFRA team members!

Documentation. Only last quarter we had 178 contributors to Jenkins documentation. It includes jenkins.io and other documentation hosted on GitHub, Wiki is not included. There is also ongoing migration plugin documentation from Jenkins Wiki to GitHub (announcement). Since the beginning of the project in Sep 2019, more than 150 plugin were migrated, and they got significant documentation revamp during the migration. You can see the current status https://jenkins-wiki-exporter.jenkins.io/progress. We also work on introducing changelog automation in the project. 123 plugins have already adopted the new changelog tools, powered by Release Drafter. Also, we had more than 60 technical blog posts published on jenkins.io.

Configuration as Code was one of the most popular areas this year. Jenkins Configuration as Code Plugin had more than 30 releases with new features and bug fixes. More than 50 plugins have been also updated in order to offer better configuration-as-code support. As a result, the JCasC Plugin got massive adoption this year (from 2000 to almost 8000 installations), and now it becomes a de-facto standard for managing Jenkins as code. This year we also ran our very first CommunityBridge project devoted to JCasC Schema validation and developer tools.

Events and outreach programs. In 2019 we participated in multiple conferences, including FOSDEM, DevOps World | Jenkins World, SCALE. More than 40 Jenkins Area Meetups were organized across the world, and there were many other meetups devoted to Jenkins. We also kept expanding our outreach programs. In total we had 12 students who participated in Google Summer of Code, Outreachy and newly introduced Community Bridge. We also had the biggest ever Hacktoberfest with 664 pull requests and 102 participants. These outreach programs help us to deliver new features in Jenkins. For example, this year we added Multi-branch Pipeline support for Gitlab and a new Plugin Installation Manager Tool during GSoC, and Outreachy resulted in a new Audit Log Plugin.

Where did we get those stats? GitHub stats came from the CDF DevStats service. These stats include all repositories in the jenkinsci organization and most popular repositories in jenkins-infra, Jenkins X and other organizations/repositories within the project are not included. Other stats came from project reports, component changelogs, Jenkins usage statistics service, plugin releases history.

What’s next?

Year 2020 will be pretty busy for the Jenkins project. There are many long-overdue changes in the project, which need to happen if we want the project to succeed. As it was written Board elections blogpost, there are many areas to consider: UX revamp, cloud native Jenkins, pluggable storage, etc. In the coming months there will be a lot of discussions in mailing lists and special interest groups, and we invite all teams to work on their roadmaps and to communicate them in the community.

Next month we will participate in FOSDEM, and there will be a Jenkins stand there. On January 31st we will also host a traditional contributor summit in Brussels, where we will talk about next steps for the project, in terms of technical roadmaps and the project governance. If you are interested in Jenkins, stop by at our community booths and join us at the summit! See this thread for more information.

We also plan to continue all outreach programs. At the moment we are looking for Google Summer of Code 2020 mentors and project ideas (announcement), and we will be also interested to consider non-coding projects as a part of other programs like CommunityBridge. We also work on improving contribution guidelines for newcomers and expert contributors. If you are interested, please contact the Advocacy and Outreach SIG.

And even more

This blog post does not provide a full overview of what changed in the project. The Jenkins project consists of more than 2000 plugins and components which are developed by thousands of contributors. Thanks to them, a lot of changes happen in the project every day. We are cordially grateful to everybody who participates in the project, regardless of contribution size. Everything matters: new features, bug fixes, documentation, blog posts, well reported issues, Stackoverflow responses, etc. THANKS A LOT FOR ALL YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS!

So, keep updating Jenkins and exploring new features. And stay tuned, there is much more to come next year!

About the Author – Oleg Nenashev

Jenkins core maintainer and board member. Oleg started using Hudson for Hardware/Embedded projects in 2008 and became an active Jenkins contributor in 2012. Nowadays he leads several Jenkins SIGs, outreach programs (Google Summer of Code, Hacktoberfest) and Jenkins meetups in Switzerland and Russia. Oleg works for CloudBees and focuses on key projects in the community. GitHub Twitter Blog

Jan 10

We can do it! Get involved in 2020

By cdfoundation Blog, Staff

By Jacqueline Salinas, Director of Ecosystem & Community

Happy New Year everyone! We are so excited to kick off 2020. We are quickly approaching our first birthday this March, which is a huge milestone for the foundation.

The CD Foundation appreciates all of the hard work and contribution from the community in 2019, without the collaboration and contributions from you it would have been very challenging to get to the end of Year 1.

As we mature and grow we want to ensure that collaborating with us is easy. We realized that we needed to have a more streamlined process for collecting & publishing content. Here’s information on how to submit your blogs, case studies, PR/News, Announcements, and Meetups to the marketing folks at the CD Foundation. Let’s make some magic happen this 2020!

Blogs

We get it… you don’t always have the time to run a meetup or travel to a conference or summit. We encourage the community to participate in other ways such as submitting written content. We would love to hear from you. Here’s how to submit your blog in 3 easy steps:

1. Select your topic and write your blog! Pro tip: Good topics are ones that the community has asked for like project milestones, project roadmap announcements, recaps of community events & conference attendance, etc.

2. Submit your blog through our form: https://cd.foundation/cdf-blog-submission-form/ Pro tip: Make sure you give us permission to see your shared doc!

3. Once we receive your submission we will send over a confirmation email and provide you a publishing date, edits & feedback, and we will also collaborate on creating some social media posts to promote your blog through the CD Foundation’s social channels.

Case Studies

Working on something cool? Do you have content that was already published and can get recycled through the CDF as a case study? Get in touch with us and let’s collaborate on a case study. Kick off a conversation with me and schedule some time to chat:

1. Drop us a line and set up a 30 min call through my calendly link here: https://calendly.com/jsalinas-cdf and email me at jsalinas@cd.foundation.

PR/News/Announcements

If you are speaking at an event on behalf of the CD Foundation, speaking about CI/CD technologies, recently interviewed, or know of an article that will be published soon? Let us know and we will publish this on our website and social channels. Please get Jesse Casman involved as he is our PR guru.

1. Send your PR/News/Announcement content here: pr@cd.foundation

Meetups

Are you interested in becoming a Meetup organizer or CDF CI/CD Community Ambassador? No CI/CD Meetup in your city?

Here is how to request to join the CD Foundation Meetup Network. We sponsor the quarterly fees, and we will support you wherever possible. Please complete this form and you will be on your way to joining our network CI/CD Meetups.

1. Complete this form to request to create a group in your region: https://forms.gle/ztLU8g126cFzYQhA6

There are other ways to get involved in your local Meetup community! You can also join as a Meetup co-organizer and become part of the CD Foundation’s CI/CD Community Ambassador program. Learn more about the program requirements, benefits, and how to get involved.

1. Read more about joining the CD Foundation’s CI/CD Community Ambassador program

2. Apply here!

Newsletters

We are excited to share the latest news with the community about the progress of each project, training & resources, new blog posts, and important updates. We encourage the community to submit content they wish to share with the CI/CD community.

The CD Foundation team will compile all submitted content from the members and community to publish the bulletin on the last week of each month. If you are interested in submitting content here’s how:

1. Submit your content with this form: https://forms.gle/4BR3QjZWUVrEUPub7

2. Stay connected with the CD Foundation: https://cd.foundation/stay-connected/

Dec 12

What’s New in Tekton 0.9

By cdfoundation Blog, Project

By Dan Lorenc
dlorenc@google.com
twitter.com/lorenc_dan

Another 6 weeks, another Tekton release. It’s mostly common knowledge that Tekton’s logo is a robot cat, but it’s lesser known that the releases are named after robots and cats! Each Tekton Pipelines release is given a codename of a type of cat followed by a famous robot.

On Monday, December 2nd, Andrea Frittoli of IBM cut the v0.9.0 release, dubbed “Bengal Bender”. This release contained commits from 21 different individuals. I wanted to take the time to highlight some of the new features and API changes, as well as to point out what much of the “under the covers” work is laying the groundwork for.

So let’s jump in!

New Features and Bug Fixes

“Bengal Bender” includes a solid set of features, bug fixes and performance improvements. Apologies if I missed anything here, this list is simply what I find most exciting.

Script mode!

https://github.com/tektoncd/pipeline/pull/1432

If you were at Kubecon San Diego you might have come away with the impression that Go is the language of the cloud. And while that is true to some extent, good old bash and yaml also play a huge part, especially when it comes to “glue” systems like delivery pipelines.

If you’ve spent much time working with containers, you’ve probably seen a yaml file with something like this in it:

- name: hello
  image: ubuntu
  command: ['bash']
  args:
  - -c
  - |
      set -ex
      echo "hello"

This is a lot of complicated boilerplate just to run a simple bash script inside a container. And if you’re not deeply familiar with how bash, shells, entrypoints and shebangs all work at the system level, this is a bit opaque. It’s also prone to subtle and confusing bugs. Even if you are familiar with these things, you’ve probably wasted time debugging issues when the shell in your container is set to something you’re not used to, or the entrypoint is overridden, or “bash -c” doesn’t do what you expect.

This makes delivery pipelines harder to write, understand and maintain.

Enter script mode! Inspired by some ideas from Ahmet Alp Balkan, Jason Hall put together a proposal to make it much easier to define tasks that just need to run a simple bash script. Here’s what it looks like:

- name: hello
  image: ubuntu
  script: |
    #!/bin/bash
    echo "hello"

You’ll notice that there are far fewer lines of boilerplate. No more need to specify args, an entrypoint or remember the tricky “-c” part. Just specify the interpreter you want to use and the commands to run. This has already let us simplify dozens of test cases and examples!

Performance

https://github.com/tektoncd/pipeline/pull/1545

Tekton has long suffered from poor performance around starting PipelineRuns. Christie Wilson and I did a debugging/coding session last spring to try to improve this, and identified PVC mounting as a major contributor. Unfortunately, our attempted fix didn’t work and needed to be rolled back.

A more general longer term fix is being handled by Scott Seaward and the re-resources effort, but I decided to take another stab at a short term fix. Fingers crossed that it works, but initial testing shows improvements of anywhere between 5 and 20 seconds per PipelineRun!

API Changes

There have been a few changes to the API as we start to firm things up for a beta release. We’re hoping to get the majority of these breaking changes in over the next few releases so users can start to build production systems on top of stable versions.

The breaking changes in v0.9.0 include:

Standardization of output paths for image digests

Tekton currently provides a mechanism to store the digests of container images built by Tasks. This mechanism predated the PipelineResource subsystem, and required Task authors to write these digests to a specific location at /builder/image-outputs. This change moves that to the standard path for output resources, at /workspace/output/<resource-name>.

Simplification of the cluster resource

Cluster PipelineResources make deploying and working with Kubernetes clusters from within Tasks simple. They provide mechanisms for users to declare where a cluster endpoint is and how to authenticate with it. Then, during Task execution, they automatically configure a .kubeconfig file so Kubernetes tooling can find that cluster. This release contained a few changes to make these cluster resources easier to work with.

Previously, users had to specify a name parameter twice: once in the resource name and once as a parameter to the resource. The second parameter has been removed.

Ground Work

Following the age-old programming advice above, most of the work contained in each Tekton release is in service of features that won’t be exposed until a later release. Digging into the commit log shows a detailed picture of what the community is working toward.

Here’s my editorialized version of what’s coming soon 🙂

Revamped PipelineResources

A lot of work went into cleaning up the existing PipelineResource subsystem, including the interface exposed to PipelineResource types and the types themselves. Getting these both solid will form the basis for the larger Re-resources effort, which is currently underway. This project will make the resource types extensible, allowing anyone to add and use their own types. It will also hopefully leave us with some embeddable components, so that other systems can make use of Tekton PipelineResources and the coming catalog.

API Versioning

One of the most important steps in shipping a stable API is figuring out how to make changes in a backwards compatible way. No API is perfect, so the ability to upgrade one is paramount. Vincent Demeester and his colleagues at Red Hat have been hard at work designing and implementing an API versioning system that will allow users to upgrade Tekton API versions without breaking existing workloads. This will be key to the coming beta release.

Wrapping Up

The Tekton project has been amazing to watch grow. This post only details the changes in the Tekton Pipelines release, but there has also been some awesome work done in the Triggers, CLI and Dashboard projects. Triggers now support out-of-the-box Github and Gitlab validation. The CLI has improved support for creating PipelineResources and starting Tasks interactively. Visualization is coming soon to the Dashboard! I’d like to thank everyone that has made Tekton what it is today.

The Tekton community has been hard at work shipping the right APIs and components to build cloud-native software delivery systems. If you’re using Tekton, or interested in learning more about Tekton, we’d love to hear from you. Please consider joining the community, becoming a Tekton Friend or contributing directly.

Dec 04

Fujitsu Joins Continuous Delivery Foundation As Premier Member

By cdfoundation Announcement, Blog

Japanese Global 500 IT services provider committed to providing leadership, helping to further accelerate development of open source CI/CD tools and methodologies

San Francisco, December 4, 2019 – The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing projects for continuous delivery, today announced that Fujitsu has joined the CDF as a premier member.

Fujitsu joins CDF premier members such as Cloudbees, IBM, Google, CapitalOne, CircleCI, jFrog, Huawei, Netflix, and Salesforce in working together to make continuous delivery tools and processes as accessible and reliable as possible and to grow the overall ecosystem.

“We are pleased to join the CD Foundation. We have been involved in the development and deployment of CI/CD technologies for many years, and believe strengthening an overall structure for CI/CD governance and management directly benefits the overall industry, software developers, and Fujitsu customers worldwide,” said Katsuhisa Ohta, Director of SOFTWARE BUSINESS UNIT, Fujitsu. “The CD Foundation is the right type of organization to help steer the course of development in the continuous delivery space. We look forward to participating actively.”

Open source technologies such as Jenkins, JenkinsX, Spinnaker and Tekton, which are hosted by the CDF, help development teams from companies of all sizes and industries improve their speed and productivity when creating cloud-native, legacy infrastructure, mobile, IoT, and bare metal applications.

“We’re thrilled to be working with Fujitsu as we aim to help enterprises worldwide accelerate the adoption of continuous delivery technologies and best practices as quickly and easily as possible,” said Dan Lopez, CDF program manager. “With containers, microservices and Kubernetes on the rise, Fujitsu and other CDF members have a key role to play in growing and sustaining the CI/CD ecosystem.”

Fujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company, offering a full range of technology products, solutions, and services. Fujitsu is also an established leader in implementing continuous delivery practices and tools to empower development teams to achieve faster, more frequent release cycles. Fujitsu will help build industry specifications and guidance around pipelines, workflows and other CI/CD areas, as well as provide foundational support for CI/CD tools.

CDF members have hosted multiple Continuous Delivery events this year, including events co-located with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China and the Continuous Delivery Summit, co-located during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019.

Additional CDF Resources

About the Continuous Delivery Foundation

Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) serves as the vendor-neutral home of many of the fastest-growing projects for continuous delivery, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Tekton, and Spinnaker, as well as fosters collaboration between the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors to further continuous delivery best practices. The CDF is part of the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about the CDF, please visit https://cd.foundation.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Nov 25

A View from CD Summit and KubeCon: The CD Foundation Begins to Build a Community

By cdfoundation Blog, Staff

By Tracy Ragan, CEO DeployHub, CD Foundation Board Member, November 21^st, 2019

CD Summit and KubeCon are over. As I sit here at our booth on the last day of KubeCon 2019, I reflect on the great work the CD Foundation (CDF) has done to begin building a community of Continuous Delivery experts and users. We have had an amazing week and must give a shout out of thanks to our ‘big brother’ the CNCF for providing a co-located even for our first North American CD Summit.

In case you were not able to attend this truly amazing conference, let me update you on the week of work and fun.

We started Monday morning with the first North American CD Summit. We released a press announcement that covered our current progress around building community and adding new members. From there we began to see our conference room begin to fill-up. At one point during the morning, Tracy Miranda, conference MC, had to ask us to shift seats to make sure everyone had a place to sit down as there were so many people standing in the back of the room. As I was the front row, I had no idea what was occurring behind me. Our first North American CD Summit had sold out.

Sweeeeet!

So facing a sold out day everyone knew they had to bring their ‘A-game’ to the show. We had some truly amazing presentations by end users, member companies, CDF Board members and experts. After a full day of presentations, the room was still full with only a few empty seats. In other words, everyone stayed for the full CD Summit.

We ended the evening with a party hosted by JFRog, WhiteSoure, DeployHub and Puppet. And what a great time we had. Open bar, table topics to stimulate conversation, cheese board and raffle prizes. CD Summit attendees like to party.

And then we got to work. The Budget Committee, Strategy Committee and the Outreach Committee had their first face-to-face working sessions. We got to meet the new Director of Ecosystems, Jacqueline Salinas. A focus around interoperability was reinforced as a primary talking point. We have started to further clarify and implement the CD Foundation’s Governing Board 9 Strategic Goals for 2020.

Overall, it was a powerful CD Summit and a great way to end 2019, even though there is yet one more event to attend, DevOps World in Lisbon Portugal. Have a fun week in Lisbon if you lucky enough to attend that event. And we will see the rest of you at your next local CD Foundation Meetup.

Nov 15

Broader Scope for Meetups, More Opportunities for You to Get Involved!

By cdfoundation Blog, Staff

By Jacqueline Salinas, Director of Ecosystem

The CD Foundation (CDF) and premier member Cloudbees are announcing the transition of Jenkins Area Meetups (JAMs) to CI/CD Meetups. This is an important change. Under the CDF umbrella, the CI/CD community will be able to cover a broader range of topics and technologies that will include Spinnaker, Tekton, or general CI/CD. Our goal for this transition is to grow and foster collaboration within the CI/CD community.

How Do I Get Involved?

Want to join an existing meetup? There are over 106 groups in 39 countries with a total of over 34,000 members, find one near you: https://www.meetup.com/pro/cicd-cdf

Want to start a meetup? Drop me a line, I’d love to hear your idea: jsalinas@contractor.linuxfoundation.org

Thank you!

I just want to express my gratitude to the open source community. The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) would not be here about to host our first North America CD Summit on November 18^th at Kubecon 2019 San Diego without your contributions.

Since the launch of the CD Foundation in March of 2019 our charter has been to serve as the vendor-neutral home for the most important open source projects for continuous delivery and specifications to expedite the release pipeline process. The first projects to be hosted by the CDF include Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, and Tekton. Our goal at the CDF is to help facilitate an open governance model that encourages participation and technical contribution from the community. The CDF will provide a framework for long-term stewardship and sustainability for CI/CD tools part of the foundation.

Our first step towards this was to ask the existing JAMs organizers to work with us to transition the Jenkins Meetup Pro account to CDF. This means each meetup organizer has more tools and options within meetup.com for organizing meetups and connecting with their local community. You can create customized mailing lists, integrate with Mailchimp, and track the growth of members and RSVPs over time. The overall Meetup Pro account has been rebranded to CDF. JAM organizers are welcomed to transition their meetup to CI/CD to include all four projects, but by no means are they under any obligation to do so.

We cannot wait to see our community grow and what 2020 has to offer!

Thanks!

Jacqueline Salinas, Director of Ecosystem

Nov 15

A Year of Tekton

By cdfoundation Blog, Project

Author: Dan Lorenc (dlorenc@google.com, twitter.com/lorenc_dan, github.com/dlorenc)

Last year at Kubecon Seattle, Tekton was just an idea in the heads of a few people, and a bit of code inside knative/build-pipeline. Fast forward to today, and we have a thriving community, independent governance inside a great foundation, and we’re quickly approaching our beta release! This year has flown by, so I wanted to highlight some of the original goals of the Tekton project, and some of the milestones we’ve hit toward them.

The Start

When Christie, Jason and I started sketching out the original Tekton APIs on a whiteboard in San Francisco, we had a straightforward goal in mind: make the hard parts of building CI/CD systems easy. There are already dozens of CI/CD systems designed to run on kubernetes, and for the most part they all have to build the same basic infrastructure before they can start solving customer problems. Kubernetes makes scheduling, orchestration and infrastructure management easier than anyone could have imagined, but it still leaves users with a few pieces to assemble before they can use it as an application delivery platform.

These were some of the original whiteboard sketches on what later became the Tekton Pipeline CRD.

Things like basic DAG orchestration, artifact management, and even reliable log storage are outside the bounds of the core Kubernetes APIs. Our plan was to use the new Custom Resource Definition feature to try to define a few more “nouns”, on top of the existing Kubernetes primitives, that were better suited for Continuous Delivery workloads. In doing so, we would make it easier for people and trans to create delivery systems designed for their exact use cases, while making sure the underlying primitives allowed for some degree of compatibility.

Vague ideas are great, but it’s much more productive to collaborate with others when you have something concrete to share and get feedback on. So in August of 2018, we released the sketch and principles we used to design it on knative-dev and to a few other interested parties. The feedback was amazing. The core pipeline team on Jenkins at Cloudbees jumped in with some hard earned lessons from their experience working on the most widely used orchestration system in history. The Concourse team at Pivotal helped redesign our extensibility system based on what they learned from the successful Concourse resource model.

Then we got to work building it all out! Our goal must have really resonated with others, because we could really feel the power of open source from day one. Even when there were only a few of us working together at Google, we were part of a much larger effort. We really wouldn’t be here today without the help of our contributors, maintainers and governing committee members.

A New Home

Around the time we prepared for our first release, it started to become obvious that Tekton (then called knative/build-pipeline) needed its own home. The knative brand and community helped immensely, but Tekton was meant to provide CI/CD for everyone – not just serverless or even kubernetes users. So in February of 2019, we decided to split out the project, name it “Tekton” and donate it to the newly-forming Continuous Delivery Foundation just in time for the 0.1.0 release.

Kim Lewandowski announcing Tekton at the Open Source Leadership Summit

Open source, governance, and communities are hard. The move out of knative and into a new foundation was a big change for the project, but has proven worth the effort! Tekton still works great with other knative components, but has had the chance to grow its own community and evolve to a spot that its users need. Thanks to the community, Tekton has expanded into multiple projects like the Dashboard and CLI, and in Tekton Pipelines we have been so lucky to gain the expertise of folks like Vincent Demeester and Andrea Frittoli.

The rest of this year has felt like a blur, but I wanted to call out some major milestones we hit:

March – The first Tekton Pipelines release (v0.2.0) using Tekton itself!
June – First release of the Tekton CLI!
July – The first Tekton Pipelines release (v0.5.0) by a community member not at Google!
July – Tekton Friends repo created!
August – First release of the Tekton Dashboard!
September – First Triggers release!
October – Tekton passed 100 contributors in October!

What’s Coming Next?

We’re rapidly approaching the first Tekton beta release! As part of this effort, we evaluated our API surface and identified quite a few areas that need hardening. This includes finishing up the table-stakes requirements for a CI/CD platform – things like triggers, metadata storage and building up our catalog. The Triggers v0.1.0 release has made Tekton usable in so many new ways, and we’re just getting started there still!

Scott Seaward has has just started work on refactoring PipelineResources into an extensible system that will form the basis for the Tekton catalog, and Jason Hall is working on a metadata storage system that will help power some new ideas around software supply chain management.

If you’d like to get involved in the Tekton project, you can find us on Github, Slack or our email list . We’ll also be at Kubecon next week! Come attend one of the many sessions or the CD Summit. Here’s to Tekton in 2020!

Nov 14

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

By cdfoundation 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

The CD Interactive Landscape is Live

By cdfoundation 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

CD Foundation’s Governing Board Unveils 9 Strategic Goals

By cdfoundation 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.

Drive continuous delivery adoption
Cultivate growth & adoption of CDF projects
Foster tool interoperability
Champion diversity & inclusion in our communities
Foster community relations
Grow the membership base
Create value for all members
Promote security as a first class citizen
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!

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