DEVOPSdigest

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced 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'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.

"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, VP of Developer Relations, the Linux Foundation and CTO of CNCF.