The Road to Interoperability in Cloud Native Continuous Delivery

Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021

Authors: Fatih Degirmenci, Kara de la Marck

Summary

The presentation discusses the importance of interoperability in the CI/CD domain and how it can be achieved through standardized metadata for CI/CD events.

Interoperability is a major challenge in the CI/CD domain due to the fragmentation of technologies and the lack of standardized metadata for CI/CD events.
The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) provides a neutral home for open source CI/CD projects and enables interoperability through abstractions.
The Interoperability SIG within the CDF focuses on ways to reduce the need for data mapping between projects and tools by increasing interoperability through standardized metadata for CI/CD events.
The Four Keys project and Jenkins X are examples of projects that use Git events to generate metrics for CI/CD pipelines, but they require mapping between different data formats.
Standardized metadata for CI/CD events would enable greater interoperability between tools and platforms and improve the maintainability of CI/CD systems.
The CDF is also working on event specifications to enable better consumption and production of metadata.
Collaboration and cross-pollination across communities and industries is key to addressing interoperability challenges.

Measuring DevOps success requires organizations to collect key metrics to evaluate delivery performance. However, it is difficult to achieve this since the tools used by organizations expose these metrics in different ways. Standardized metadata for CI/CD events would help with this mapping work and enable more consistent data to be used for analysis.

Abstract

The emergence of cloud native has resulted in tremendous advances in enabling organizations to develop new services and make them available to end users. In addition, new paradigms such as Continuous Delivery (CD) allow organisations to do this much faster than before, empowering them to go to market ahead of the competition. Despite its many advantages, the cloud native CD ecosystem has its challenges. This session will discuss issues arising from the lack of interoperability across proliferating cloud native CD technologies. We will look at end user case studies, including existing integration initiatives such as that between Tekton and Jenkins X. However, these initiatives are localised to the projects involved and do not address the challenges holistically. We will highlight the necessity, and greater sustainability, of a holistic approach to interoperability in the CD ecosystem and invite attendees to join community efforts.

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