The open source Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) project on Aug. 4 became the first project to graduate from the Continuous Delivery (CD) Foundation.
Officially launched by the Linux Foundation in March 2019, the CD Foundation includes in its project portfolio some of the most widely used and deployed CI/CD tools, including Jenkins, Spinnaker and Tekton. Jenkins was a mature, widely used technology prior to being part of the CD Foundation, but it didn't benefit from the same type of vendor-neutral open source governance model that its new home aims to provide.
Tracy Miranda, CD Foundation governing board chair and director of open source community at CloudBees, told ITPro Today that the Jenkins CI/CD project was the first to go through the graduation process due to its maturity. There are certain criteria that a project needs to meet to graduate, including adoption, best practices and governance, she said.
Jenkins Demonstrates Adherence to Open Source Principles
Among the milestones that the Jenkins CI/CD project achieved to reach graduation was a perfect score on compliance with the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative, showing up-to-date best practices for security, analysis and quality processes. Also, the code of conduct was updated and a new adopters page was created.
Prior to joining the CD Foundation, Jenkins already had an open source community that was led by CloudBees, the project's primary backer and creator. As part of the CD Foundation, the project now has additional support. For example, the foundation helps with infrastructure project needs, usage statistics and a new automated release process with authenticated code signing keys, Miranda said.
"In short, the CD Foundation helps sustain and grow the projects, and so, no surprise last month, Jenkins had its highest number of contributors ever — 951," she said.
Jenkins Open Source Roadmap
One of the biggest changes for the Jenkins CI/CD project since becoming part of the CD Foundation is the development of an open source roadmap for the project's future.
"The new roadmap is an attempt to pull together all the various activities across companies as well as individual plug-in developers and have visibility for planning," Miranda said.
Among the key items on the Jenkins roadmap are a number of capabilities designed to improve user experience. Miranda highlighted an upcoming capability to enable a configuration-as-code setup, which will make Jenkins deployment easier for administrators.
"There is also an ongoing UI makeover being done in an iterative way as it has to coordinate changes across plug-ins," she said. "And let's not forget the most requested community feature: a dark theme. Dark themes seem to be today's developer aesthetic of choice, so many will be happy to run Jenkins in dark mode now."
Looking forward, Miranda said the next significant long-term support (LTS) release of Jenkins should be available mid-September. The new LTS will include user interface improvements, including the dark theme, as well as improved Microsoft Windows support and security hardening.
"We expect folks to really start noticing the new, shiny UI improvements in this release," Miranda said. "There really is a lot of great activity in the Jenkins community, so the roadmap is very welcome as a way to get insights into what's new and upcoming across the whole ecosystem."
