Andrea Frittoli

Continuous Delivery is all about getting your software released, and as software/system complexity continues to increase, so does the need to have many different tools, services and even people involved in building, verifying, deploying and monitoring your software. So, how do we make all these tools and services work together to complement each other without creating a massive spider web of explicit interconnectedness? CDEvents!

In this talk, Andrea Frittoli and Erik Sternerson will present the CDEvents project and protocol from the Continuous Delivery Foundation, describe how events in continuous delivery will help build a strong toolbox of CI/CD tools that can be used for delivery of different types of software projects, and showcase some integrations done by the community.

The number of tools and services supporting CI/CD keeps growing. Each tool has its own strengths and enables its own unique use cases. It is not one-size-fits-all, every project needs to be able to select CI/CD tools according to their own needs.

What CDEvents aims to do is to give these tools and services an obvious way to become interoperable through a shared event/messaging protocol, so that true end-to-end continuous delivery pipelines and processes with associated monitoring, metrics and insights can be built without the need for “manually gluing things together”.

Having the freedom to add and replace CI/CD tools and services without needing to worry about compatibility and interoperability issues will help projects keep their delivery processes optimized, and will also enable a new kind of visualization and monitoring tools that can inspect and understand all actors in the CI/CD system without explicitly knowing any of them.

Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) system are hardly ever ceaseless as the name would suggest; they do aim though to follow changes in code, configurations and versions. They often achieve that by both handling and generating events. For instance, a CD system receives an event that describes a new version of an application, and it runs a workflow in response. When the workflow starts or when it reaches completion, the CD system generates events for the benefit of other processes that may want to trigger tests against the newly deployed application version. In this short presentation, we introduce the "Events in CI/CD" interest group, part of the Continuous Delivery Foundation, and its mission of standardization and interoperability between CI/CD systems via events.

In this talk, the speakers will present their experiences about using Tekton - a cloud-native pipeline system - to test, release and continuously deploy itself.

Tekton is a Kubernetes-native, lightweight, easy to manage CI/CD pipelines engine. Pipeline building blocks can be reused, version controlled and curated in a catalogue that embeds best practices. Tekton, hosted by the CD Foundation, aspires to be the common denominator in CI/CD, modelling what Kubernetes has become in cloud-native application development. The Tekton team wanted to make sure that the project is going in the right direction by "dogfooding" i.e. by using Tekton to run its own automation "plumbing". The initial continuous integration setup embedded most of the testing pipelines in bash scripts. The speakers replaced this with Tekton, hence improving the readability of the pipelines and the reproducibility of CI runs. Eventually, they moved onto continuously delivering Tekton and its pipelines via Tekton. In this talk, the speakers will tell their experiences about using a cloud-native pipeline system to test, release and continuously deploy itself.