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.