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.
