Linux Foundation bows Continuous Delivery Foundation for industry collaboration

The Linux Foundation announced on Tuesday that it has launched the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) to collaborate on the delivery of software tools.

With the continued proliferation of cloud-native, Kubernetes and microservices, continuous delivery and continuous integration (CI/CD) have become key tools, but to date they have been largely fragmented. CDF was created to establish interoperability between the various continuous delivery (CD) projects and tools.

CD is a software engineering approach that pushes shorter software release cycles while also catching potential problems at an early stage of development. While CI/CD practices are used across various industry verticals, as well as in other Linux Foundation open source projects, the increased use of microservices and cloud-native environments have created a bigger demand for CD tools.

"The problem is a lot of the solutions aren't really compatible with each other. It's kind of very rare that they are," said Chris Aniszczyk, vice president of developer relations, the Linux Foundation and CTO of the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), in an interview with FierceTelecom. "The whole founding of the Continuous Delivery Foundation started a little over a year ago when we were having discussions with the Jenkins community to look for a home for the CD project in a foundation. A lot of people are using Jenkins and other tools for continuous delivery and the whole goal was to do something that is broader in scope than just Jenkins and encompasses continuous delivery in general."

CDF will start with four seed projects: Jenkins, an open source CI/CD system that has over 15 million users; Jenkins X, which is an open source CI/CD solution that is widely used in CNCF; Spinnaker, an open source multicloud CD solution developed by Netflix and jointly led by Netflix and Google; and Tekton, which is an open source project and specification for CI/CD components that was donated to CDF by Google. CDF will add other projects after it forms its technical oversight committee (TOC.)

While CI/CD is closely aligned with CNCF and telcos, Aniszczyk said CDF will encompass other industries that use software.

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The founding members of CDF are: Alauda, Alibaba, Anchore, Armory, Autodesk, Capital One, CircleCI, CloudBees, DeployHub, GitLab, Google, Huawei, JFrog, Netflix, Puppet, Red Hat, SAP, and Snyk.

"We're in the bootstrapping phase where we have set up a charter, we're building out the governing body and building up the TOC based on the first set of four projects," Aniszczyk said. "We're forming the board, technical committees and the marketing outreach committees over the coming months and inviting a wider audience to participate."

CDF will participate in the CNCF's KubeKon conference on May 20 in Barcelona, Spain.