continuous delivery

Contributed by Garima Bajpai, CDF Ambassador Chair

Continuous Delivery Mini Summit—happening on September 19 in Vienna, Austria in co-location with Open Source Summit Europe—is a focused half-day event for CI/CD practitioners, community leaders, startup founders, and investors interested to delve deeper into Continuous Delivery innovation, progressive features, and roadmap presented by open source communities specifically for Continuous Delivery stack. 

The impact of Continuous Delivery will be significant enabling accelerated delivery of software in upcoming years. It is important that we focus on standardized approaches toward technology integration into the CI/CD ecosystem with the help of open source communities. The CD Foundation attempts to bring together CI/CD practitioners, through various initiatives like publishing reports, organizing summits, etc. Taking leads from the latest  State of CI/CD Report, published by CD Foundation, highlighted several areas of improvement for CI/CD stack including software deployment performance. It stated that software deployment is worse when using multiple CI/CD tools of the same form, likely because of challenges related to interoperability.  

This year, our key talks from the CD Mini Summit, circle around developing a series of features improving interoperability, observability, progressive rollouts. Bringing attention to interoperability related innovation, we have talks highlighting how open source projects are solving that challenge for Continuous Delivery.  

CDEvents leverages best practices in Continuous Delivery, to define a common language for CI/CD ecosystem events, the standardized events capability simplifies integrating different system workflows, and improves observability and auditability. The CDEvents project recently released the fourth version of its interoperability and observability specification. The first talk at CD Mini Summit “What’s new in CDEvents v0.4” is about what is new in the specification, as well as the most recent updates about CDEvents adoption and the work of the CDEvents community. The speaker will provide insight into the project roadmap, current collaborations with other communities, and how to join CDEvents.  

Another talk reflects improving visibility and interoperability between various tools developed by the open source communities, “Enhancing Interoperability in CI/CD Workflows Using CDEvents”, will highlight the experience working with developing CDEvents support for different tools using the CDEvent’s Java SDK, Go SDK, and Webhook Adapter which enables the adoption of CDEvents into different tools such as Spinnaker, Flux, Jenkins and Gerrit and demonstrating CI/CD workflow using these tools. 

Moving forward, one of the key areas of focus at the summit would be improving the performance of the software delivery by adopting emerging tools and technology for Continuous Delivery. With the open source community continuously fostering innovation, we would discuss, “Progressive Infrastructure Delivery using Kargo and Argo CD”, explaining the positive impact it has on the developer experience and improving progressive rollout of infrastructure changes to all stages. 

Again, referring to the latest State of CI/CD Report, the proportion of low performers for each of the deployment performance metrics is increasing. To address this part, we have tried to highlight the importance of smaller deployments through one of the talks at the summit “Working in small batches: overcoming cultural barriers”. This talk re-emphasizes why working in small batches is considered one of the key principles of implementing Continuous Delivery. It covers the benefits and discusses examples of using smaller batch sizes as well as strategies to overcome such cultural barriers, and how it helps improve the performance metrics. 

Lastly, improving the quality of the software deployment is on everybody’s “to-do” list, however, there is not enough time and focus on testing. In one of the talks at the summit “Test Orchestration using Tekton”, how Tekton is helping in test orchestration. 

There are several other takeaways from the CD Mini Summit as this blog only covers part of the summit talks. CD Foundation has been enhancing the productivity of the software delivery through developing open source initiatives for emerging practices, tools & continuously fostering collaboration with the open source community. We look forward to contributions of the open source communities and help us drive synergies, standard approaches, and support organizations with Open source strategies for Continuous Delivery. 

View the CD Mini Summit Schedule and plan to join us on September 19.