SIG Events: Using CloudEvents to Create an Interoperable CI/CD Ecosystem

The presentation discusses the importance of standardization and event-driven architecture in the context of continuous delivery (CD) and software supply chain.

• The CD Events Special Interest Group (SIG) was formed to create a shared vocabulary for CD and software supply chain in a protocol-agnostic way.
• The group focuses on four logical buckets for events: core packets, source code version control, continuous integration, and continuous deployment.
• Events are data records expressing an occurrence and its context, and they help create loosely coupled integration between different tools in the ecosystem.
• CD events play an important role in creating visibility across distributed workflows.
• A proof of concept was built to test the assumptions and demonstrate the benefits of CD events in a concrete scenario.

The presentation describes a demo of two different open-source projects working together to build, deploy, and monitor the release of a web application. The tools were not designed to work together, and creating a specific integration point would have been difficult. However, CD events played a crucial role in enabling the tools to communicate with each other and create a visible workflow.

With more organizations adopting a Cloud-Native architecture and microservices, continuous delivery has evolved from mere best practices to an indispensable tool to swiftly and reliably bring new features in front of customers. The CI/CD landscape is rich and diverse, with tools like Keptn, Flux and Argo that offer opinionated solutions to specific problems. Organizations rely on various ones to address their automation requirements, but they lack a way to consistently orchestrate, monitor and measure their overall workflow. There is a real need for interoperability and standardization in the CI/CD space: solving this problem is the mission of the Events Special Interest Group at the CD foundation. The speakers will present their work at the SIG in establishing a shared dictionary and set of CloudEvents, a “lingua franca” for tools to understand each other and collaborate to solve a wide range of scenarios. They will demonstrate using shared events to let existing tools work together.