The Linux Foundation Announces New Foundation to Support Continuous Delivery Collaboration

New initiative provides neutral home for Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, Tekton projects and the next generation of continuous delivery collaboration

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. – Open Source Leadership Summit – March 12, 2019 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announces a new foundation for the diverse continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) space. The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) will serve as the vendor-neutral home for the most important open source projects for continuous delivery and specifications to expedite the release pipeline process. CDF will foster collaboration between the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors to evangelize CI/CD and DevOps methodologies, define/document best practices, provide guidelines, and create training materials to enable any software development team around the world to implement CI/CD best practices.

The first projects to be hosted by the CDF will include Jenkins, an open source CI/CD system, Jenkins X, an open source CI/CD solution on Kubernetes, Spinnaker, an open source multi-cloud CD solution, and Tekton, an open source project and specification for CI/CD components. Additional projects are expected to join CDF through its soon to be formed Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) with the focus of bringing together the CD ecosystem to build specifications and projects around portability and interoperability.

The CDF will have an open governance model that encourages participation and technical contribution and will provide a framework for long-term stewardship and sustainability for CI/CD tools part of the foundation. The foundation is launching with 20+ founding members including Alauda, Alibaba, Anchore, Armory.io, Atos, Autodesk, Capital One, CircleCI, CloudBees, DeployHub, GitLab, Google, HSBC, Huawei, IBM, JFrog, Netflix, Puppet, Rancher, Red Hat, SAP, Snyk, and SumoLogic.

“We are excited to welcome the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) into the Linux Foundation. We’re creating a neutral environment to enhance the tools and best practices needed to speed and ease software development and delivery,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation. “Every industry and company relies on software to compete, which is why open source and CI/CD are preferred and pervasive across collaborative, real-time software development teams.”

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. With the increased use of microservices and cloud native architectures, continuous delivery tools and practices are in greater demand, providing improved velocity and productivity for software development teams.

“The Jenkins community is thrilled to be hosted by the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Under the CDF, we hope to create an industry-wide specification with collaboration from a broader group and create a shared investment in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, creator of Jenkins and CTO at CloudBees.

“I’m really excited to see the formation of the CDF – it’s starting with some of the most popular best-of-breed open source tools in the CI/CD space,” said James Strachan, co-founder of Jenkins X and distinguished engineer, CloudBees. “I’m looking forward to increased collaboration between us all to help accelerate the open source CI/CD landscape.”

“Spinnaker, created by Netflix and jointly led by Netflix and Google, is a Continuous Delivery platform that’s been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams over millions of deployments. Development teams rely on Spinnaker every day to release software changes with high velocity and confidence,” said Andy Glover, Director, Delivery Engineering at Netflix. “The ecosystem coming together in one foundation is a unique opportunity to move the state of the art for Continuous Delivery forward, and the Spinnaker community is excited to be part of this evolution,” said Steven Kim, software engineering manager, Google Cloud and Spinnaker Steering Committee member.

“Continuous Delivery is a critical part of modern software development, but today the space is heavily fragmented. The Tekton project  addresses this problem by working with the open source community and other leading vendors to collaborate on the modernization of CI/CD infrastructure,” said Dan Lorenc, Staff Software Engineer, Google Cloud. “Establishing a vendor-neutral foundation to create specifications will allow the rapidly changing CI/CD space to take full advantage of containers and the broader cloud native ecosystem. For these reasons, we’re excited to host the Tekton project under the CDF, and look forward to collaborating with the other founding members.”

The Cloud Native Interactive Landscape illustrates how diverse the CI/CD space is and the many projects and vendors active in the space.

“As the market has shifted to containerized and cloud native technologies, the ecosystem of CI/CD systems and related tools has radically changed. The number of available CD tools has increased, and there’s no defining industry specifications around pipelines and workflows to aid portability amongst tools. Capital One, CircleCI, CloudBees, Google, Huawei, IBM, JFrog, Netflix and the other Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) founding members recognize the need for a neutral home for collaboration and integration to solve this problem. The CDF will establish a community of projects to advance industry best practices and innovation around CI/CD,” said Chris Aniszczyk, Vice President of Developer Relations, the Linux Foundation and CTO of CNCF.

Jenkins Background

Jenkins is the leading open source automation server supported by a large and growing community of developers, testers, designers and other people interested in continuous integration, continuous delivery and modern software delivery practices. Built on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), it provides more than 1,500 plugins that extend Jenkins to automate with practically any technology software delivery teams use. In 2019, Jenkins surpassed 200,000 known installations making it the most widely deployed automation server.

Jenkins X Background

Jenkins X is an open source CI/CD solution for modern cloud applications on Kubernetes. Jenkins X provides pipeline automation, built-in GitOps and preview environments to help teams collaborate and accelerate their software delivery at any scale. Jenkins X automates CI+CD for Kubernetes using the best of breed OSS tools such as Jenkins, Tekton, Prow, Skaffold, Kaniko and Helm.

Tekton Background

Tekton is a set of shared, open source components for building CI/CD systems, and is being contributed to the CDF by Google. The project is agnostic about the deployment target, whether it is Kubernetes, VMs, bare metal, mobile or even something else. Tekton modernizes the Continuous Delivery control plane by taking advantage Kubernetes and shifts the software deployment there. Tekton includes primitives such as pipeline definition, source code access, artifact management, and test execution.

Spinnaker Background

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud Continuous Delivery platform originally created by Netflix and currently jointly led by Netflix and Google. It supports all major cloud platforms and Kubernetes, with contributions from their respective providers. Spinnaker is typically used in organizations at scale, where DevOps teams support multiple development teams by providing “golden path” application deployment pipelines.

Supporting Quotes

Premier Members

Capital One

“We are pleased to see the formation of the CDF. DevSecOps is important in our ability to ship products with speed and reliability, and the CDF is well timed to curate a growing toolset in order to help establish consistency and simplify adoption.” – Jag Gadiyaram, Head of Open Source, Capital One

CircleCI

“Continuous delivery is fundamentally critical to how teams deliver value. Being able to release small changes, multiple times a day, is a crucial competency for companies in a cloud-native world.” – Jim Rose, CEO, CircleCI

CloudBees

“Everyone is a developer and any idea delivered changes the world. We have seen continuous delivery become the gold standard for delivering ideas, therefore forming the Continuous Delivery Foundation is a natural evolution in making continuous delivery accessible to all. We are proud to be a founding member of the CDF, to support the inclusion of Jenkins and Jenkins X and to foster the industry collaboration and interoperability that will surely result from this.” – Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder, CloudBees

Google

“The ability to deploy code securely and as fast as possible is top of mind for developers across the industry. Only through best practices and industry-led specifications will developers realize a reliable and portable way to take advantage of continuous delivery solutions. Google is excited to be a founding member of the CDF and to work with the community to foster innovation for deploying software anywhere.” – Kim Lewandowski, Product Manager, Google Cloud

Huawei

“We believe that the CD foundation will drive CI/CD tool development, development practices and industry specifications. The digital world is built on top of software. By being a member of the Foundation, Huawei hopes to explore and share with members and partners of Foundation to provide developers with the best CI/CD services and practices and to make software development even more Agile, efficient, and trustworthy.” – Xu Feng, GM, DevCloud, Huawei

IBM

“Application development is rapidly changing to keep pace with the velocity of innovation in the multicloud ecosystem. Automation powers enterprise modernization, and CI/CD provides the core foundational capability enabling  enterprise developers. We are proud to be joining the CD Foundation, working to bring forward the next generation of open software delivery capabilities.” – Danny Mace, VP Hybrid Cloud App Platform, IBM

JFrog

“At JFrog, we’re on a mission to make software liquid, creating DevOps pipelines that flow freely, like water. Delivering software continuously with streamlined CI/CD technologies is a requirement for the modern enterprise in realization of this vision, and we’re looking forward to leading and contributing to the CDF to bring developers and community standards together.” – Yoav Landman, CTO and Co-founder, JFrog

Netflix

“Continuous Delivery powers innovation at Netflix and we’re thrilled to be a founding member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation. Working with other leading practitioners to promote Continuous Delivery through specifications is an exciting opportunity to join forces and bring the benefits of rapid, reliable, and safe delivery to an even larger community.“ – Andy Glover, Director of Delivery Engineering, at Netflix

General or End User Members

Alauda

“Modern organizations that seek to continuously innovate demand a high degree of automation, as well as the agility and consistency in software delivery. We are glad to see the formation of the CD Foundation. It will foster a vibrant community to cultivate cultural shifts, methodologies, best practices, as well as an ecosystem of interoperable tools that empower organizations to continuously deliver value. We look forward to contributing to this mission.” – Kai Chen], CTO, Alauda

Alibaba

“Alibaba is honored to be one of the founding members of CDF. We believe that the specifications around pipelines, workflows and other areas can help ease the adoption of CI/CD practices in the industry. Alibaba has been working on enterprise-class CI/CD for many years. We would like to share these experiences with the industry through open source contributions and working with CDF members to build a mature CD ecosystem that helps developers and companies efficiently and safely deliver software.” – Liu Guohua, GM, R&D Efficiency, Alibaba

Anchore

“In the modern IT era of containers and microservices, industry collaboration is imperative when defining specifications around the tools and methods organizations will deploy when implementing a continuous delivery model. The formation of The CD Foundation is an important step toward providing the necessary infrastructure and user community to accomplish this.” – Saïd Ziouani, CEO, Anchore

Armory.io

“Spinnaker is rapidly being chosen by enterprises as the open-source software delivery platform used to modernize their application deployments. Armory is very excited to see Spinnaker join the CDF because it will provide the infrastructure and marketing support required to push Spinnaker to the next level of mainstream adoption.” – Ben Mappen, CPO, Armory.io

Atos

“Atos is excited to be part of the continuous delivery foundation. Transforming our customers application development methods from a traditional approach to a model that enables hybrid / multi-cloud development and deployment based on DevOps.” – Michael M. Kollar, Senior Vice President, Chief Digital Officer & Global Head of Cloud Engineering, Atos Fellow and Member of Scientific Community

Autodesk

“As Autodesk becomes a cloud platform company, the benefits of DevOps are critical to our success. We’re excited to join the Continuous Delivery Foundation to share and leverage best practices and technology that are propelling  the industry forward.” – George Swan, Sr. Director, Build Platform Leader, Autodesk

DeployHub

“The timing is right for a conversation on how continuous delivery is impacted when we move from monolithic workflows to microservice workflows moving across the pipeline. The CD Foundation is the right place for that discussion.” – Tracy Ragan, CEO, DeployHub, Inc.

GitLab

“As one of the first to bring cloud native CI/CD to the market, GitLab is looking forward to leading and collaborating with the CD Foundation to bring awareness and best practices to the industry. We look forward to lending our experience in working with millions of developers and thousands of enterprises to provide them with everything they need in their DevSecOps workflow to accelerate application development. Together we can move software innovation forward by educating the industry on how to deliver software to production both quickly and securely.” – Sid Sijbrandij, CEO, GitLab

HSBC

“Delivering new features faster, while making sure that our services are solid and secure, is ever more important to our customers and our business: an open, vibrant CD community is essential to that mission. We’re pleased and excited to join the Continuous Delivery Foundation and look forward to being part of the community.” – David Knott, HSBC Chief Architect

Puppet

“As cloud-native application architectures change the way teams build and deliver software, continuous delivery has become even more critical. Having a neutral organization to collaborate and define industry specifications around pipelines, workflows and other areas of CI/CD is essential to making it easier for more organizations out there to adopt continuous delivery and realize the significant benefits it provides.” – Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO, Puppet

Rancher

“As a leader in Kubernetes management, Rancher has a long history working with leading CI/CD technologies such as Jenkins and Spinnaker. Rancher users have created enterprise container platforms combining the power of Rancher with their existing CI/CD infrastructure. We are excited about the creation of CD Foundation and look forward to integrating these new Linux Foundation projects into Rancher.” – Sheng Liang, CEO, Rancher Labs

Red Hat

“Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are key capabilities in delivering modern, cloud-native services. Red Hat and our customers view both as critical points of emphasis for IT  organizations, especially as these teams seek to respond to evolving business demands through improvements in time-to-value by delivering production quality code more quickly and safely. As a leader in both the Knative and Knative Build projects, we’re pleased to extend this work to Tekton as a member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation and we see this  as another great proof point for the value of broad industry collaboration around Kubernetes.” – Chris Wright, CTO, Red Hat

SAP

“Our mission is to help our customers to become Intelligent Enterprises. An efficient software development process and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) are critical for making this process successful for SAP and our customers. We are excited to join the Continuous Delivery Foundation as a founding member to foster collaboration in the industry and to shape open standards and interoperability for the CI/CD ecosystem.” – Gunther Rothermel, SVP SAP Cloud Platform

Snyk

“Continuous delivery is the foundation for modern software development, providing the acceleration, assurance, and governance needed for the fast pace we seek. Snyk is excited to see the CDF bring this community together to accelerate CI/CD practices themselves. With our focus on empowering developers to own security through the software lifecycle, we will help ensure security is built into this modern software pipeline.” – Guy Podjarny, CEO, Snyk

SumoLogic

“There is a clear disruption happening across the software development ecosystem, and developers are being challenged to deliver code changes faster amidst diversification across CI/CD systems, DevOps, containers and other related tools. We’re thrilled to be the first analytics vendor that is part of the Continuous Delivery Foundation, and look forward to contributing to the community and provide the Continuous Intelligence needed to improve visibility, and speed application development and deployment within modern software delivery lifecycles.” – Christian Beedgen, CTO and Co-founder, Sumo Logic

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, CloudBees.

Additional Resources

• CDF Twitter

• CDF FAQ

• CDF Blog

• CDF TOC
• Join CDF

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) is a Linux Foundation initiative that serves as the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing projects, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, and Tekton. The CDF fosters collaboration between the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors to further continuous delivery best practices. For more information about the CDF, please visit https://cd.foundation.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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Media Contact:

Natasha Woods

The Linux Foundation

nwoods@linuxfoundation.org