Jenkins graduates in the Continuous Delivery Foundation

About 18 months ago, Jenkins became one of the CDF founding projects, along with Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton. A new foundation was formed to provide a vendor-neutral home for open source projects used for Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration. Special interest groups were started to foster collaboration between projects and end user companies, most notably: Interoperability, MLOps and Security SIGs. Also, a Community Ambassador role was created to organize local meetups and to provide public-facing community representatives. Many former Jenkins Ambassadors and other contributors are now CDF Ambassadors, and they promote Jenkins and other projects there.

Thanks to this membership we addressed key project infrastructure needs. Starting from Jan 2020, CDF covers a significant part of the infrastructure costs including our services and CI/CD instances running on Microsoft Azure. The CD Foundation provided us with legal assistance required to get code signing keys for the Jenkins project. Thanks to that, we were able to switch to a new Jenkins Release Infrastructure. The foundation sponsors the Zoom account we use for Jenkins Online Meetups and community meetings. In the future we will continue to review ways of reducing maintenance overhead by switching some of our self-hosted services to equivalents provided by the Linux Foundation to CDF members.

Another important CDF membership benefit is community outreach and marketing. It helped us to establish connections with other CI/CD projects and end user companies. Through the foundation we have access to the DevStats service that provides community contribution statistics and helps us track trends and discover areas for improvement. On the marketing side, the foundation organizes webinars, podcasts and newsletters. Jenkins is regularly represented there. The CD Foundation also runs the meetup.com professional account which is used by local Jenkins communities for CI/CD and Jenkins Area Meetups. Last but not least, the Jenkins community is also represented at virtual conferences where CDF has a booth. All of that helps to grow Jenkins visibility and to highlight new features and initiatives in the project.

The Jenkins project has a long history of open governance which is a key part of today’s project success. Starting from 2011, the project has introduced the governance meeting which are open to anyone. Most of the discussions and decision making happen publicly in the mailing lists. In 2015 we introduced teams, sub-projects and officer roles. In 2017 we introduced the Jenkins Enhancement Proposal process which helped us to make the key architecture and governance decisions more open and transparent to the community and the Jenkins users. In 2018 we introduced special interest groups that focus on community needs. In 2019 we have expanded the Jenkins governance board so that it got more bandwidth to facilitate initiatives in the project.

Since the Jenkins project inception 15 years ago, it has been steadily growing. Now it has millions of users and thousands of contributors. In 2019 it has seen 5,433 contributors from 111 countries and 272 companies, 67 core and 2,654 plugin releases, 45,484 commits, 7,000+ pull requests. In 2020 Q2 the project has seen 21% growth in pull requests numbers compared to 2019 Q2, bots excluded.

One may say that the Jenkins project already has everything needed to succeed. It is a result of continuous work by many community members, and this work will never end as long as the project remains active. Like in any other industry, the CI/CD ecosystem changes every day and sets new expectations from the automation tools in this domain. Just as the tools evolve, open source communities need to evolve so that they can address expectations, and onboard more users and contributors. The CDF graduation process helped us to discover opportunities for improvement, and address them. We reviewed the project processes and compared them with the Graduated Project criteria defined in the CDF project lifecycle. Based on this review, we made changes in our processes and documentation. It should improve the experience of Jenkins users, and help to make the Jenkins community more welcoming to existing and newcomer contributors.

Below you can find a few key changes we have applied during the graduation process:

More details about the public roadmap are coming next week, stay tuned for a separate blogpost. On July 10th we had an online contributor meetup about the roadmap and you can find more information in its materials (slides, video recording).

It an honor to be the first project to reach the graduated stage in the Continuous Delivery Foundation, but it is also a great responsibility for the project. As a project, we plan to continue participating in the CDF activities and to work with other projects and end users to maintain the Jenkins' leader role in the CI/CD space.

We encourage everyone to join the project and participate in evolving the Jenkins project and driving its roadmap. It does not necessarily mean committing code or documentation patches; user feedback is also very important to the project. If you are interested to contribute or to share your feedback, please contact us in the Jenkins community channels (mailing lists, chats)!

CDF graduation work was a major effort in the Jenkins community. Congratulations and thanks to the dozens of contributors who made our graduation possible. I would like to thank Alex Earl, Alyssa Tong, Dan Lorenc, Daniel Beck, Jeff Thompson, Marky Jackson, Mark Waite, Olivier Vernin, Tim Jacomb, Tracy Miranda, Ullrich Hafner, Wadeck Follonier, and all other contributors who helped with reviews and provided their feedback!

Also thanks to the Continuous Delivery Foundation marketing team (Jacqueline Salinas, Jesse Casman and Roxanne Joncas) for their work on promoting the Jenkins project and, specifically, its graduation.

The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) serves as the vendor-neutral home of many of the fastest-growing projects for continuous delivery, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Tekton, and Spinnaker, as well as fosters collaboration between the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors to further continuous delivery best practices. The CDF is part of the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about the foundation, please visit its website.

To know more about the Jenkins graduation in the Continuous Delivery Foundation, see the announcement on the CD Foundation website. Also see the special edition of the CD Foundation Newsletter for Jenkins user success stories and some surprise content. The press release is available here.