CloudBees announced it is expanding the scope and reach of its Jenkins open source continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform into the realms of compliance and serverless computing frameworks.
Announced at the DevOps World | Jenkins World conference in Nice, France, a new plugin for Jenkins adds support for the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) defined by Amazon Web Services (AWS). That model spans AWS Lambda functions, application programming interfaces and Amazon DynamoDB tables and is natively supported by AWS CloudFormation. The AWS SAM plugin supports both classic FreeStyle jobs and Jenkins Pipeline to make it possible to read and deploy serverless applications.
In effect, CloudBees is making it possible to treat AWS Lambda as a natural extension of any CI/CD pipeline. Longer term, serverless computing frameworks will play a larger role in the cloud-native instance of CloudBees as well.
In the meantime, CloudBees is also extending its CI/CD platform to address compliance issues that arise from identity management. CloudBees Core is now integrated with the LDAP-based directory Google makes available within its Cloud Identity service. This capability makes it possible to centralize user management policies by using the same Google Cloud Identity or G Suite credentials to connect to CloudBees Core.
Christina Noren, chief product officer for CloudBees, noted governance and compliance are becoming much bigger issues within best DevOps practices as more responsibility for security continues to shift left toward developers.
The CloudBees community continues to grow, even as the number of CI/CD rivals continues to expand. At the conference, CloudBees executives revealed the Jenkins community has grown 24 percent in the period Sept. 30, 2017, to September 30, 2018, reaching 192,623 active installations. That number only applies to installations that permit usage information to be transmitted to the Jenkins project, so this number is not representative of the total Jenkins user population. All told, it’s estimated there may be anywhere from 15 million to 23 million developers globally relying on Jenkins. CloudBees also noted the combined number of defined Jenkins Pipeline and other jobs increased during this same annual period, from 10,509,706 million to 20,664,054 million, with Jenkins Pipeline jobs demonstrating growth of 309 percent from last year.
Noren said one of the primary reasons for that continued success is that unlike other CI/CD platforms that provide a highly opinionated framework accessible only as a cloud framework, the Jenkins environment makes it possible to deploy a more flexible framework on-premises or in a public cloud.
Of course, there are still millions of developers that have yet to be exposed to any type of CI/CD framework. But as DevOps practices continue to become the primary method through which application development and deployment is increased, it’s now only a matter of time before most developers are working within the context of a CI/CD platform.
In fact, it’s arguable that those organizations that don’t soon embrace CI/CD platforms will be overwhelmed by rivals capable of updating applications at rates that are increasingly being measured in days and hours versus weeks and months.
— Mike Vizard
