The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) announced today that the open source Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) has officially graduated.
Jenkins was donated last year to the CDF, an arm of The Linux Foundation, along with Jenkins X, a CI/CD platform for Kubernetes; Spinnaker, a CD platform; and Tekton, a framework for building pipelines that will be employed as the foundation for next-generation CI/CD platforms.
Tracy Miranda, CDF Governing Board Chair and director of open source community at CloudBees, said that although Jenkins traces its lineage back to 2004, the CDF wanted to make sure the same requirements that are being applied to graduate other projects are applied to Jenkins despite its obvious maturity. The CDF requirements for graduating a project are to demonstrate growing adoption, have an open governance process, feature maturity and a strong commitment to community, sustainability and inclusivity.
The CDF also today published a public road map for Jenkins. Key features include improving the user/administrator experience and tighter integration with cloud platforms. Work has also begun on Operator tools for simplifying the deployment of Jenkins on a Kubernetes cluster.
Longer-term, the CDF is focused on expanding the adoption of Tekton-based Trigger pipelines across both Jenkins and Spinnaker. Tekton pipelines are easier to create and can be reused across multiple platforms. Jenkins X already employs Tekton-based pipelines, which were originally developed by Google.
The founding members of the CDF are CloudBees, Google, CapitalOne, CircleCI. Fujitsu, Huawei, IBM, JFrog, Netflix and Salesforce.
In the nearer term, Miranda said the CDF is also attempting to standardize the glossary of terms applied to DevOps processes. The goal is to provide something akin to a “Rosetta Stone” that will help make DevOps more accessible to IT professionals just starting their journey.
In theory, at least, platforms such as Jenkins X accelerate the development of microservices-based applications running on Kubernetes clusters. In practice, however, many IT teams continue to use Jenkins and other CI/CD platforms to build both monolithic and microservices-based applications.
As Kubernetes gains momentum, however, the way applications are deployed may also evolve. Today most DevOps teams push application code from a CI/CD platform on to a target system. However, if Kubernetes is deployed on multiple platforms it may become easier to automate the delivery of code by enabling Kubernetes clusters to pull code from CI/CD platforms on demand.
As organizations transition to building and deploying microservices-based applications, it’s also apparent there will be a much greater need to rely on best DevOps practices to manage all the dependencies that will exist between each microservice. Legacy application development processes will not be able to keep pace with the rate at which microservices based on containers are ripped and replaced.
Of course, it’s not clear to what degree organizations may prefer to stay with Jenkins, which is built on a Java virtual machine, versus adopting Jenkins X or a CD platform such as Spinnaker. However, as the interoperability between these platforms continues to improve, it may not be surprising to one day find DevOps teams employing a mix of all of them across different application development projects.
