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!

Oct 18

Love0

Join Us at Spinnaker Summit, KubeCon 2019

By jsalinas Announcement

Spinnaker Summit 2019 brings together the rapidly growing global community of Spinnaker users – an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence, created at Netflix and used by JP Morgan Chase, Cerner Healthcare, Capital One and others around the globe. Spinnaker has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams over millions of deployments. It combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers.

This year’s conference will bring together the Spinnaker users together with Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s KubeCon to unite our open source community members. Join us and discover how Spinnaker and Kubernetes integrate seamlessly to make software deployment pipelines more flexible and also help with visibility, configuration, and easier rollbacks. With Kubernetes and Spinnaker, you can create a robust continuous delivery flow that helps to ensure your software is shipped as quickly as it is developed and validated.

Our Spinnaker Summit 2019 agenda includes more than 30 breakout sessions featuring 50 speakers presenting real world examples of Spinnaker enterprise deployments along with continuous delivery innovations. Participate in interactive hands-on Spinnaker training workshops, leverage free childcare services, network with members at our community event, and hear from our Spinnaker experts.

Use code SLACK20 at www.spinnakersummit.com to save 20% at registration.

Sep 30

Love0

Join Us at the Continuous Delivery Summit, KubeCon San Diego

By tracymiranda Announcement

Register Now!

The CD Foundation is hosting a one-day ‘Continuous Delivery Summit’ on November 18 just before KubeCon San Diego (Nov 18-21). This time round, Christie Wilson and myself, Tracy Miranda, will be co-chairs and look forward to welcoming you to the summit!

We had our very first CD Summit at KubeCon Barcelona where we had fun and learnt a lot. We were very grateful for feedback on that event and that people wanted to hear more about:

Best practices showcases
More on integration efforts
Customer implementation examples/case studies

Program Committee

Since then the CD Foundation has gotten bigger (we are only just 6 months old!) and it is great to see our community growing. For the CD Summit call-for-papers we had 57 amazing submissions for just 15 slots!

We would like to thank the following community members who volunteered and reviewed talk submissions:

Tessa Kriesel (Circle CI)
Sarah Conway (Snyk)
Tracy Ragan (DeployHub)
Michael Neale (CloudBees)
Jayne Groll (DevOps Institute)
Fatih Degirmenci (Ericsson)
Andy Glover (Netflix)
Tim Fong (Linux Foundation)
Raj Panchapakesan (JFrog)

We had some excellent talk submissions and were pleased to see so much choice, especially covering the topics we highlighted in the call-for-papers that are the focus areas of the CD Foundation. It was tough to select just ~25% of the submissions, and in some cases we had to get creative to squeeze a speaker/talk onto the program.

Project Talks

We are featuring talks on the CDF’s 4 member projects, Jenkins, Spinnaker, Jenkins X & Tekton, including:

Jenkins and Spinnaker are highlighted in Using Jenkins and Spinnaker to Supercharge Your Deployment Pipelines by Isaac Mosquera, Armory, as well as in lightning talks.

See what’s next in Jenkins X in Latest and Greatest from Jenkins X by James Rawlings & James Strachan of CloudBees.

Tekton is showcased in our Real World Case Studies and Lightning Talks.

Real World Case Studies

We love a real world story of people figuring out CI/CD, warts and all! We have some great talks including these two from insurance company North West Mutual, and building materials company Heidelberg Cement (yes a cement company – should be a solid talk!)

Must-have topics

We were very happy to have these speakers focus on some key topic areas, namely making sense of the CI/CD Landscape, Security, Interoperability & Integration and the Human side of DevOps.

Panel

We had some really intriguing talk submissions that we just couldn’t fit into the program but we really wanted to hear from them somehow or the other at the summit. With that in mind we have invited these lovely folks onto a CI/CD panel on Teams & Tools:

Dawn Parzych, LaunchDarkly
Angel Rivera, CircleCI
Vincent Demeester, Red Hat
Eric Sorenson, Puppet

Lightning Talks

To round out the day we have a good mix of lightning talks, including in the emerging area of MLOps. Dan Lorenc has enthusiastically volunteered to MC these and keep everyone on track – speakers you have been warned!

The event runs on November 18 from 9am to 5pm. We have space for 200 registrants and at the time of writing 60 spaces were already gone, so please do register soon. Additionally we will have an evening social event (after the Kubecon lightning talks) – details to follow.

We’re very excited and to finish off, here’s what my co-chair Christie has to say about joining us at the event:

“It’s always exciting to bring together so many people who are focused on an often neglected activity at the heart of all of our software cycles: CI/CD. There’s so much potential in this space and so much room for everyone to get involved and make it better – hope to see you there!”