Dear DevOps “enthusiast”,
You are confused. But I am confused as well. For approximately two years now this DevOps thing has been both exciting and frustrating. And in ways that are totally different for each of us. At the intersection of all the disparate confusion is the “perfect storm”. What that means for now is that we are all hunkered down in the basement, reading books on “DevOps” to pass the time, and better understand the thing that is attempting to destroy us.
At ChefCon today Chef made a major announcement unveiling Chef Delivery a “new DevOps workflow product that for the first time enables the continuous delivery of infrastructure, runtime environments – including containers – and applications.” Chef has examined the use success patterns of many of its thousands of customers to distill what they believe is the formula for success in a DevOps environment.
I had a chance to speak with Alex Ethier, VP of Product and Jay Wampold, VP of Marketing at Chef about Delivery. They were both really jazzed as they think this is a real game changer for not only Chef but the entire DevOps market. Chef is already a leader in the DevOps community with a rapidly growing base of customers in the Global 2000 and a dominant adoption position among AWS customers. Delivery will extend the Chef platform into the entirety of the DevOps workflow.
Chef believes this is the time to expand the Chef platform to the entire DevOps workflow. Just about every analyst firm and survey data indicates that DevOps is on the way to wide spread adoption among IT teams of all sizes. While DevOps is about cultural change, once the organization recognizes the advantages to a DevOps culture, tools that leverage this culture are sure to expand their footprint.
I asked Alex and Jay if Delivery would bring Chef into competition with other DevOps tool vendors. For instance Jenkins and CloudBees in the CD and CI area would seem to be square in the cross hairs of Delivery. While on its surface this would seem to be the case, Delivery is actually a platform that is designed to leverage APIs and open source to to work with a large ecosystem of 3rd parties including Jenkins, CloudBees and other players in the DevOps ecosystem. I am still not 100% sure where the cooperation will end and the competition will begin, but I guess we will have to wait and see how that shakes out.
Based on Chef’s customer experience research they think this is what the flow of DevOps looks like:
Some steps are and will remain manual. Chef is seeking to play in the automated areas. Yes this is an ambitious move by Chef. If they succeed they will leverage their already dominant position in the DevOps configuration management field into becoming a dominant player in the entire DevOps life cycle.
Powering this life cycle is the fact that with the move to the cloud today’s enterprises are moving from static systems to rapidly changing services. This is putting new pressures on IT departments to perform in a “high velocity IT” manner. The key to all of this is of course automation. Under it all Delivery seeks to automate CI, CD and continuous testing.
Chef’s CTO, Adam Jacob had this to say about Chef Delivery, ““The tools we use reinforce the behavior; the behavior reinforces the tool. Thus, if you want to change your behavior, change your tools.”
Other highlights of Chef Delivery from the Chef press release are:
This could indeed be a real game changer for already high flying Chef. While at ChefCon today I intend to ask many of the partners and vendors exhibiting here how they view Delivery and what kind of integrations we can expect to see from them for it.
One thing for sure is the DevOps tools market is evolving and maturing rapidly. Tool vendors will have to move quickly to allow high performing IT teams to move at the speed of DevOps.
“We want to do continuous deployment” – i’ve heard this many times, but have yet to find a scenario where it actually fit. Why? Because you are confused. And rightly so. How many two letter acronyms can be thrown at you in one movement. DevOps takes the confusion further and has two of the acronyms identical, but meaning very different things. The CDs, which are not the round shiny discs in this case. This straight forward post hopefully helps clear up some of the confusion.
We recently held another webinar in our continuing series at devopsy.kinsta.cloud. We partnered with the good people at CloudBees on CI and CD across the enterprise with Jenkins. The webinar featured:
Cyrille Le Clerc is Director of Product Management at CloudBees with more than 15 years experience in Java. Prior to CloudBees, Cyrille was Chief Technology Officer at Xebia. As an early adopter of the “you build it you run it” model, he put it in place for a number of high volume web sites. He naturally embraced DevOps culture. He is also very active in the Java community, creator of the open source project “embedded jmxtrans” and a speaker at various conferences.
It proved to be the most popular webinar we have held yet with almost 1500 people registered! Many were not able to log in live for the event. We are making a recording available for those who could not attend and anyone else who would like to listen:
Hope you enjoy it and stay tuned for more webinars.
We are happy to announce the next devopsy.kinsta.cloud Webinar, in partnership with CloudBees :
Delivering value to the business faster thanks to Continuous Delivery and DevOps is the new mantra of IT organizations. In this webinar, CloudBees will discuss how Jenkins, the most popular open source Continuous Integration tool, allows DevOps teams to implement Continuous Delivery.
You will learn how to:
REGISTRATION LINK: (Limited registration, so don't wait!)
Cyrille Le Clerc is Director of Product Management at CloudBees with more than 15 years experience in Java. Prior to CloudBees, Cyrille was Chief Technology Officer at Xebia. As an early adopter of the “you build it you run it” model, he put it in place for a number of high volume web sites. He naturally embraced DevOps culture. He is also very active in the Java community, creator of the open source project “embedded jmxtrans” and a speaker at various conferences.
One of the linchpins in the DevOps tools box is Jenkins. Just about everyone knows Jenkins. For those few not familiar with Jenkins, here is an excerpt from the “What is Jenkins” page:
What is Jenkins?
Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron. Among those things, current Jenkins focuses on the following two jobs:
Jenkins offers the following features:
But beyond the wiki how did Jenkins become one of the most successful open source projects of all time? The answer to that has a lot to do with CloudBees, a little to do with Oracle and even more to do with an architecture that supports an ecosystem that has allowed almost a thousand plugins to be developed to the core project.
First let’s get the little do with Oracle out of the way. Jenkins was originally known as Hudson. Hudson was started by Sun Microsystems. When Oracle bought Sun it inherited a lot of open source projects (OpenOffice and Java among them). Many in the open source community questioned Oracle’s intentions regarding open source. It didn’t take long for a dispute to arise between many of the Hudson developers and Oracle. Oracle claimed they owned the term Hudson and that had an easy answer. There was a vote taken and Hudson became Jenkins. When Oracle objected, Jenkins became a fork of Hudson (or Hudson became a fork of Jenkins). Oracle still maintains Hudson, which is a shell compared to Jenkins.
In the meantime Sacha Labourey former CTO at JBoss, started CloudBees in 2010. This was after JBoss was acquired by Red Hat. CloudBees created a PaaS that was one of the first PaaS to support the entire application lifecycle from development to deployment. A key part of CloudBees offering was the Jenkins Continuous Integration (CI) engine. Labourey brought in Kohsuke Kawaguchi, a founder and key contributor to Jenkins. Along with Kawaguchi, several other key Jenkins contributors also came to CloudBees.
CloudBees and their employees contributed more than 80% of the code to Jenkins. Jenkins and the community that supports it is thriving. I had a chance to speak with Kawaguchi about this. He is very proud that there are over 1000 plugins now for Jenkins. I was blown away by a number of something like 500k downloads a month from the Jenkins website.
Of course a thriving open source community does not necessarily translate into a thriving commercial business. There have been many companies that never cracked the formula to monetize there open source success.
This is where CloudBees appears to be winning. I spoke to Kwaguchi about CloudBees commercial success. With offices around the world CloudBees has been able to translate an iconic open source project into a thriving business. They have a set of enterprise (ready pay for) plugins that enhance Jenkins in a number of ways. Additionally, the offer hosted versions of Jenkins, CI-a-a-S if you will. They call in Jenkins Operations Center. They also offer Dev@cloud, which is an umbrella for other services and software that enhance and make Jenkins easier to use across different platforms, with different languages and other options. Of course they offer support for your Jenkins installs as well.
All in all, Labourey and Kawaguchi have built a thriving commercial entity on top of Jenkins, while at the same time keeping Jenkins as a healthy, growing open source project. Kudos to them for a job well done.
That is not to say that there aren’t competitors to Jenkins. There are some open source projects and some commercial projects that claim to do CI better and faster. Of course many of them benefit from having Jenkins already there as a template and just improving incrementally on this already there. You can see a full list of Jenkins competitors at: https://www.g2crowd.com/products/jenkins/competitors/alternatives
While some of these competitors offer an improvement here or there, by and large Jenkins is still the standard against which they are measured. With CloudBees guiding and managing Jenkins, it will probably stay that way for the foreseeable future.