Continuous Delivery Foundation Momentum Picks Up

The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) this week revealed that it now includes 33 member organizations, including now JPM Chase, eBay, Dell Boomi, Cycloid, White Source, the Association of DevOps Professionals and the DevOps Institute.

Founded by CapitalOne, CircleCI, Cloudbees, Google, Huawei, IBM, jFrog, Netflix and Salesforce in March the CDF is committed to promoting the adoption of open source continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools and platforms. Dan Lopez, CDF program manager, said the CDF plans to launch technical committees soon that address areas of CI/CD interest, including cybersecurity, software supply chains, software delivery management and machine learning algorithms in IT operations (MLOps).

The CDF is not focused on promoting one open source CI/CD platform over another as much as it is fostering cross-engineering whenever feasible. As such, Lopez said the CDF is trying to advance adoption of the open source Jenkins and Jenkins X CI/CD platforms as well as the Spinnaker platform from Netflix. As other open source technologies are presented to the CDF, a technical oversight committee will evaluate them for inclusion, he said.

At present, the membership of the CDF falls into three broad categories: companies that build tools and platforms, companies that leverage those technologies to deliver products and services and end user organizations such as JP Morgan Chase, eBay and CapitalOne.

Lopez said the next goal is to expand the reach of the CDF beyond the U.S. and Europe to create a global CI/CD community. It’s not clear how many CI/CD platform providers will join the CDF. However, as membership in the CDF increases, pressure to join continues to mount.

In the meantime, DevOps teams should expect collaboration between vendors to accelerate the pace of innovation across the entire DevOps life cycle. Vendors will be able to more easily identify areas to collaborate on that don’t provide much in the way of differentiation and yet are critical to advancing DevOps adoption.

While a lot of progress has been made in terms of CI use, CD has proven to be an especially thorny challenge for most organizations. That’s become a significant challenge as organizations build applications at a faster rate and in many cases are still being deployed manually in production environments. Via the CDF, vendors are hoping to promote adoption of best practices across the entire DevOps toolchain as they gear up to introduce additional products and services that assume a strong CI/CD foundation is in place.

It’s not clear to what degree the CDF will be able to accomplish that mission, given that most of the CI/CD issue organizations encounter are more cultural than technical. At the very least, however, organizations struggling with these issues should find solace among other like-minded souls wrestling with the same issues.

— Mike Vizard