Introducing the Preview Experience for CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X

The time is finally here! It’s DevOps World | Jenkins World Lisbon! After a marathon flight, I finally reached my hotel, the Corinthia, last night. The rush of relief hits. I sit down to the catch of the day, grouper, in the Erva hotel restaurant. It’s amazing, but the most amazing part of the night is definitely Diogo who made me my very first bespoke cocktail at the bar with great flourish. For those of you reading this during show week, do stop by. It’s worth it! The travel hurdle is jumped, the work is (mostly) done and it’s time to enjoy the fruits of our labor - the big launch .

I wake up this morning shaking off the jetlag and looking forward to whatever local delicacies can be found for breakfast. But before I do, I check my Slack (because who doesn’t check Slack before brushing their teeth.) Then I see. “Hey, Kristin. Do you have that link to the announcement blog?”. Well, I did say not all the work was done. And that, dear reader, is how you came to share breakfast with me just two days before launch and much to the chagrin of my marketing manager.

Fast forward to launch day when this blog goes live (today!) So what is the big launch? We are announcing the Preview Experience for CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X. This is a SaaS solution hosted by CloudBees that gives you the power of Jenkins X without the management overhead. If you saw the keynote this morning and are ready to request access now here’s the link . But if you want to hear my winning color commentary, read on.

We found in our user feedback that people find Kubernetes to be an extremely valuable and powerful tool for orchestration, but once you get past the resident ‘Kubernetes Guru’ the management of that tool becomes untenable for the development team at large. This is especially true of large enterprises that CloudBees has made it its mission to serve. Jenkins X helps you manage Kubernetes. And offering it as a SaaS makes installing and running it much easier. With CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X you’re free from the burden of infrastructure management. You no longer have to run or manage Jenkins X - you simply get to use it. In introducing this concept to close community confidants and analysts, the general consensus is that offering a SaaS is the next logical step for a company that deals in enterprise open source as we do. Though the move is logical, I still hear a few recurring ‘yeah buts’. I can hear my dad now, “Yeahbuts live in the forest!”

So let’s tackle the top three questions I hear.

1. What is the Preview Experience?
   This product is launching in what we call ‘preview’. Which means you can’t sign up and get the product automatically yet. We are using this Preview Experience in a very programmatic way to gather feedback from users on the product experience and use cases and fine-tune those before GA. We want to hand-hold our first users, incorporate their feedback, and provide a stellar product experience. We will be personally qualifying candidates and taking them in waves. Over time, we will open the SaaS up for more users. This does not mean that the product doesn’t have valuable chops today. We believe in progressive delivery, and this is us translating that concept of a gradual rollout of a feature to a macro level. And did we mention it’s free?

2. What about the CloudBees Jenkins X Distribution (CJXD)?
   CJXD is the stable release of Jenkins X. It’s our certified version of open source Jenkins X and is battle-tested with an always current Kubernetes ecosystem. CJXD is not going away with the introduction of CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X and will continue to be self-managed. There are many reasons we continue to invest in CJXD - chief among them is to support users who will continue to require a self-managed solution to run within their VPC or datacenter for regulatory or other policy reasons. As we develop features we will ask ourselves whether the feature is ideal for the individual developer or for the enterprise. Developer-centric features will be released through the community, becoming part of open source Jenkins X, CJXD and CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X. Features more suited to the enterprise will become part of CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X. In time, this will further differentiate the proprietary SaaS offering from the open-source project.

   1. This product/service is no longer being offered by CloudBees.  Visit https://jenkins-x.io/  to learn more about the community offering.

3. What can I do with CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X today?
   As I said earlier, the preview status of this product shouldn’t be equated to a lack of value. CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X inherits all the features and use cases that have been developed and improved upon since the project began in March 2018.

We couldn’t be more excited to launch the Preview Experience for CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X. If you want to join the early adopters and request access to the Preview Experience please use this link: https://cloudbees.com/products/cloudbees-ci-cd/sign-up

And if you are here in Lisbon, please stop by the booth, and check the app for all things Jenkins X. The experts are ready to share their knowledge and answer all your burning questions.

As they say in Lisbon, tchau!