7 Things We Learned at the Continuous Delivery Summit

Written by: Tracy Miranda
1 min read
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The very first Continuous Delivery Summit was held as a colocated event just before KubeCon Barcelona. This was an event to show case the projects of the Continuous Delivery Foundation , a brand-new foundation which aims to foster innovation, promote interoperability and reduce fragmentation within the CI/CD space. The event sold out (twice) and was the biggest of the 22-colocated events held that day. 

It was a great way for the community to come together, share and learn from each other. And learn we did! Here are the key takeaways from the summit. 

1. We all want to do continuous delivery, but it’s hard

Delivering new software features rapidly, safely and securely has become a key business differentiator - for every business. Every company acknowledges this but the sheer number of tools, ever-changing tech landscape and cultural changes required means that this practice is not as widespread as it should be. The opening keynote from Tracy Miranda of CloudBees and Dan Lorenc of Google talked about how the CD.Foundation  was formed to work together to tackle these challenges

 

2. Everything-as-Code is a best practice

There are four projects in CDF to date. First we had a Jenkins showcase by Kohsuke Kawaguchi of CloudBees & Ewelina Wilkosz of Praqma. This was followed by the Spinnaker showcase by Andy Phillips of Google. These tools aim to empower and provide developers with a great experience for delivering their code. Today that means having features that allow for configuration-as-code, or indeed everything-as-code! 

The everything-as-code topic was built on further in the lightning talk on 'Unit testing your configuration with Open Policy Agent ' by Gareth Rushgrove of Snyk, and also in the main KubeCon conference with sessions on GitOps . 

3. Tekton for cloud native pipelines is gaining adoption quickly

Tekton, which was originally known as Knative build/pipeline, is fast becoming the industry standard way of building cloud native pipelines. Christie Wilson of Google gave an overview of the project and the many ways to extend it. Tekton adoption is growing fast and we had integration demos from Simon Kaegi of IBM and Vincent Demeester of RedHat. 

 

4. Jenkins X is much more than Jenkins, it's CI/CD as it should be

Tekton is also fully integrated in Jenkins X. The Jenkins X showcase from Laura Tacho, James Rawlings and James Strachan of CloudBees demonstrated the easy developer flow for CI/CD on Kubernetes and powerful features including preview environments and ChatOps integrated right into GitHub. 

 

5. 20 different CI/CD tools in one organization is far too many

After the 4 project showcases, Mark Interrante of Salesforce talked about Continuous Delivery from the end-user perspective. He talked about why Salesforce joined the CDF and what challenges they want to solve by working with the wider community. Mark spoke of how Salesforce had over 20 different CI/CD tools thanks to acquisitions, different requirements, etc (including some pre-Jenkins systems). There is no one-size-fits-all but I think we all agree this was far too many for any one organization and stifles innovation - certainly a problem most companies can relate to.

Aaron Erickson of Salesforce also shared another interesting perspective with his lightning talk on 'Declarative Continuous Quality ' and the tooling Salesforce has developed for doing this.

6. Secure Software Supply Chain emerged as a theme

By asking for volunteers for lightning talks on the day the summit left space to see what topics emerged from attendees, and secure software supply chain was a hot topic. Aysylu Greenberg of Google spoke about Grafeas and Krikit and Kay Williams of Microsoft spoke about software supply chain security being an industry problem that needs an industry solution; suggesting a working group might be a great way to tackle these challenges at scale. Watch this space.

Software secure supply chain

Software secure supply chain

 

7. The CDF community is awesome

This was the first time for the CDF community to come together and start working towards the shared vision.

 

Folks stepped up in many ways whether it was volunteering to do lightning talks on the day...

...or capturing the day in Moments...

... or even lending a hand holding the microphone when needed... 

...or joining in for the ending quiz and even laughing at the jokes!

Thanks to those who showed up and made all the difference. Overall it was a superb first event and one of many to come!

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