Netflix, Google Talk Continuous Delivery at DevOps World

Source: informationweek.com

Members of the Continuous Delivery Foundation discuss the formation of the open source organization and the future of continuous integration and delivery.

The pace of software development continues to accelerate as organizations continue to march down the digital transformation path—and continuous delivery may grow into a staple of this process. Early and founding members of the Continuous Delivery Foundation came together at last week’s DevOps World / Jenkins World conference in San Francisco to talk about their plans to build up a home for neutral collaboration in this sector. In a keynote address, companies such as HSBC, CloudBees, Google, and Netflix shared their hopes for the further development of best practices through the foundation for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) in software development.

Part of the presentation showcased projects such as Jenkins, an open source automation server, as a part of the CI/CD movement.

A desire to smooth over pain points in software development led to the creation of Jenkins, which automates parts of the development process. Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of Jenkins, spoke during the keynote about the origin of his automation server and its forward evolution. He currently serves as chief scientist for CloudBees, the host of the conference.

Jenkins has its roots in Kawaguchi’s time as a software engineer at Sun Microsystems. “One afternoon, I broke one too many builds and I got a phone call from my colleagues,” he said. This led to Kawaguchi musing about creating a program that could catch his mistakes before his coworkers did. “That’s kind of how the whole thing started,” he said.

Breaking a build is akin to tugging on a thread and unraveling a garment, only in this instance the thread is code and what might unravel is an app that other engineers are also working on.

Kawaguchi joked that his experiences breaking builds were likely shared by everyone in the audience and suggested it’s a widespread occurrence that Jenkins could help with.

He shared the stage with a host of members of the Continuous Delivery Foundation that included leadership from the DevOps Institute and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. They collectively offered insights on how continuous integration and delivery needs an impartial forum. They believe further discussion can help clear up confusion as the sector advances in size, scope, and pervasiveness.

Image: Joao-Pierre S. Ruth Joao-Pierre S. Ruth has spent his career immersed in business and technology journalism first covering local industries in New Jersey, later as the New York editor for Xconomy delving into the city’s tech startup community, and then as a freelancer for such outlets as .