Why is there a need for the Continuous Delivery Foundation?

Photo by Droneflyer Nick on Unsplash

I want to talk about the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) and why I believe this organisation will be one of the next cloud-native zeitgeists.

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I first became aware of the Continuous Delivery Foundation in March 2019 when it was publicised after joining the Linux Foundation. The goal was to join the Linux Foundation as a vendor-neutral home that could allow for the CDF to curate important projects and develop governance for the continuous delivery community.

“there’s no defining industry specifications around pipelines and workflows to aid portability amongst tools” — Chris Aniszczyk ( CTO of the CNCF)

Creating a vendor-neutral home for the future of continuous delivery collaboration resonated with me as I’ve made a career out of combating fragmented ecosystems and inheriting many examples of home-spun interoperability bubble-gum.

interoperability bubble-gum

This meaning the code between the code. The CI/CD boilerplate code that exists with no purpose than to combine several activities together into a desired outcome. Every company has this overhead and with the complexity of integration and deployment patterns increasing there is a growing cottage industry of wrangling our CI/CD systems.

With the likes of CloudBees, CircleCI and Google as founding members, I felt this would be a partnership that would have enough forward momentum to make a real impact in creating a governance framework for this maturing ecosystem. It would also have the technical backing to guide emerging operator patterns such as GitOps and to create an interoperable approach for DevOps and security. The TOC (technical oversight committee) already starting to consider and implement many of the foundational community channels to collaborate with practitioners and end-users.

What are the CDF responsibilities?

In my view, the CDF has many opportunity areas for good. Below outline some of the key activities that this foundation can undertake to unite the CI/CD community.

Governance

• Providing a cohesive open vision that allows for a bridge between fragmented ecosystems and unconventional CI/CD patterns.
• Establish points of contact for the community and survey technical practitioners to understand the heartbeat of continuous delivery.
• Identify common components and establish interoperability between tooling.
• Represent the technical perspectives of a broad community.
• Create industry guidelines on best practice for operators, tooling and process for continuous delivery.r

Project sheltering

• Create digital space for projects and their collaborators to work.
• Shelter socially significant projects like Jenkins and continue their upkeep and enhancement.
• Engage with members to incubate and graduate projects of community value.
• Collaborate with projects to accelerate their adoption and applicability to a wide end-user community.

Collaboration

• Identifying trends from practitioners and end-users to create process governance. Acknowledging where repetitive actions can be abolished through foundational components or practice.
• Create avenues for end-user feedback on projects and allow for project evaluation to be driven by the community.
• Developer advocates to represent and interact with the project communities and to listen and adjust roadmaps to better assist in end-user delivery.

What does the future look like?

Photo by Rinson Chory on Unsplash

With new CD projects such as ArgoCD having joined the CNCF, I think that marketing and ecosystem advocacy will be the key challenges for 2020 within the CDF. Whilst many will associate the cloud-native moniker with the CNCF; we’re already seeing that specialism areas like the CDF as a necessity to maintain quality and federated governance.

Creating a high-quality network of vendor-neutral homes for projects will give rise to proliferation and reusability of tooling which will in-turn benefit all reciprocally. Sandbox projects within the CNCF such as SPIFFE show great promise in solving identity and policy management across CI/CD. Possibly leading to deep integrations into JenkinsX and other CDF platforms.

Kubernetes is also ubiquitous with the initial success of the CNCF, which many will look to draw parallels between the CDF’s project catalogue. But, within such innovative workflow solutions such as Tekton and long-standing platform such as Jenkins, I see this as an opportunity within the CDF to attract a demographic that might not ordinarily participate within the CNCF ecosystem.

There is a level of maturity that comes with the communities interested in governing the CDF ecosystem. They deal with tangible outcomes that are delivered through best practice and collaboratively build CI/CD. Looking objectively from a 50,000-foot view across multiple toolchains and systems that are delivery focused, helps to pinpoint emerging trends and identify how we can improve interoperability.

And in many ways, the formation of the CDF has been done as an act to give back to the community. I for one find this an exciting prospect and a new frontier of hyper-specialised collaboration, looking forward to the future and projects that it will help nurture.

“We begin at the moment that the artefact is produced. We’ve seen an evolution in terms of CI/CD. Continuous integration is almost folding into the notion of continuous delivery.” — Andy Glover (Director of delivery engineering at Netflix)

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I have felt so passionately about this need for coordination that I have volunteered as an ambassador to force multiply for those interested within this space. Helping to grow our community from the disparate pockets of CI/CD collaboration the web into a body that guides the creation of projects and best practices.