This article is based on reporting originally published by ITPro Today, covering announcements made at DevOps World | Jenkins World in San Francisco, August 2019.
Jenkins Turns 15: From a Broken Build to 15.8 Million Developers
In 2004, Kohsuke Kawaguchi was a software engineer at Sun Microsystems with a habit of accidentally breaking builds. Frustrated by colleague callbacks, he asked himself a simple question: could a program catch his mistakes before his colleagues did? That question led him to create the automation server now known as Jenkins — and, in many ways, to help define the modern era of continuous integration.
Fifteen years later, Kawaguchi serves as Chief Scientist at CloudBees, the company that provides commercial support, services, and a growing product portfolio built around Jenkins. At DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019, held in San Francisco, CloudBees marked the anniversary while also making a series of significant product announcements. According to data provided by CloudBees at the event, approximately 15.8 million developers worldwide use Jenkins as part of their DevOps workflows.
What Is Jenkins?
Jenkins is an open-source automation server primarily used to implement continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. It enables development teams to automatically build, test, and deploy code changes, reducing manual effort and catching integration errors early. Its extensibility through a large plugin ecosystem has made it one of the most widely adopted CI/CD tools in the industry.
CloudBees Flow 9.1 and Accelerator 11.1
Jenkins is foundational to CloudBees, but the company has been expanding well beyond it. At DevOps World, CloudBees announced the 9.1 release of CloudBees Flow, its Application Release Orchestration (ARO) platform. Flow came to CloudBees through its April 2019 acquisition of Electric Cloud, which had developed the product to coordinate complex, multi-team software releases across environments and pipelines.
The same acquisition brought CloudBees Accelerator 11.1, a rebranded version of Electric Cloud’s build and test acceleration product. According to CloudBees CEO and co-founder Sacha Labourey, the tool is designed to compress long build and test cycles:
“The accelerator makes it possible to accelerate build and test from hours to minutes.”
— Sacha Labourey, Co-founder and CEO, CloudBees
Feature Flags via the Rollout Acquisition
In June 2019, CloudBees also acquired Rollout, a DevOps vendor specialising in feature flag management. Feature flags (also called feature toggles) allow teams to enable or disable specific features in production without redeploying code, enabling controlled rollouts, A/B testing, and rapid rollback. The Rollout technology was rebranded and integrated into the broader CloudBees portfolio.
Labourey described the value of the capability in terms of experimentation speed:
“With Rollout, you get to experiment, measure and observe the behavior of what you want to test. And once you’re done, you can switch it off in seconds. Remember, time is acceleration, so it’s important for you to conclude your experiments ASAP.”
— Sacha Labourey, Co-founder and CEO, CloudBees
Software Delivery Management: The Big Reveal
The headline announcement at DevOps World 2019 came on August 14 with the preview of CloudBees’ Software Delivery Management (SDM) platform. The platform aims to give both developers and engineering leadership a unified, contextualised view of the state of software delivery across an organisation — aggregating data from the many disparate tools that modern development teams use every day.
Product Hub: Centralised Visibility
At the core of the SDM platform is a component called Product Hub, described by Ben Williams, Vice President of Product Management at CloudBees, as the central orchestration point for all software delivery activity:
“The Product Hub is the heart of your software delivery efforts. It’s where all of your software delivery activity is visible and orchestrated from.”
— Ben Williams, VP of Product Management, CloudBees
The dashboard ingests data from tools including Jenkins, Jira, GitHub, and observability and monitoring platforms, then presents that data in a single place with contextual organisation. Williams described the goal as consolidating a fragmented toolchain view into a coherent delivery picture for stakeholders at every level.
Efficiency Dashboard and Policy Engine
Beyond visibility, the SDM platform includes an efficiency dashboard paired with a policy engine. The policy engine allows organisations to define and enforce process rules — for example, tracking how long a work item remained idle before progressing. This kind of flow metric is closely aligned with concepts from value stream management, helping teams identify bottlenecks and waste in their delivery pipelines.
Extensibility via an App Framework
The SDM platform is designed to connect to a wide range of DevOps and CI/CD tooling through an open app framework. According to Williams:
“The app framework allows users and partners to be able to create custom integrations, to be able to contribute policies and rules to extend the data model, and to build custom functionality.”
— Ben Williams, VP of Product Management, CloudBees
At the time of the announcement, the SDM platform was available in limited preview, with broader availability and additional integrations planned for subsequent releases.
Key Takeaways
- Jenkins at 15: The open-source CI/CD server, created in 2004 by Kohsuke Kawaguchi, had reached approximately 15.8 million developers worldwide by mid-2019.
- CloudBees Flow 9.1: Application Release Orchestration platform acquired from Electric Cloud, now integrated into the CloudBees portfolio.
- CloudBees Accelerator 11.1: Build and test acceleration tool, also from the Electric Cloud acquisition, aimed at reducing cycle times from hours to minutes.
- Rollout integration: Feature flag management capability acquired in June 2019, enabling controlled feature rollouts and rapid experimentation.
- Software Delivery Management (SDM): A new cloud-based platform previewed at DevOps World, centred on a Product Hub that aggregates delivery data, an efficiency dashboard, a policy engine, and an extensible app framework.
Original reporting by ITPro Today. Announcements were made at DevOps World | Jenkins World, San Francisco, August 2019.