Originally reported by devops.com. Event details reflect the original post date of May 2020.
Overview
CloudBees Connect Virtual Summit brought together a global community of developers, CloudBees and Jenkins users, DevOps practitioners, and continuous delivery experts for two full days of focused, immersive learning delivered in a virtual environment. The North American session was scheduled for May 19, 2020 at 11 a.m. EDT, with a separate European session on May 20, 2020 at 11 a.m. CET.
What the Summit Covered
The summit focused on emerging trends and technologies shaping modern software delivery. A central theme was continuous delivery (CD)—the practice of releasing software rapidly and reliably by automating the build, test, and deployment pipeline. Sessions covered how CD reduces deployment risk while maintaining quality, and explored the tooling and cultural shifts required to adopt it at scale.
Key technical topics included:
- CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins and CloudBees Core: Best practices for continuously integrating code and building fully operational delivery pipelines.
- Containers, Kubernetes, and Jenkins X: How to build and manage a cloud-native CD pipeline using these technologies together.
- Automated security and privacy testing: Techniques for embedding continuous security checks directly into Jenkins CI/CD pipelines.
- Feature flags: Using feature flags as a deployment risk-reduction strategy, enabling code to be shipped to production while controlling feature exposure.
- COBOL modernization: How legacy COBOL source code can participate in modern branching, merging, and deployment workflows using GitHub, CloudBees, and Compuware tooling.
- Application testing with Sauce Labs: Building and testing applications using Jenkins Pipelines integrated with Sauce Labs.
- Common Jenkins troubleshooting: Practical solutions for the five most frequently encountered Jenkins problems.
Workshop Format
The summit was structured as a series of hands-on workshops rather than passive presentations. This format was designed to give attendees practical, applicable skills they could implement immediately after the event—covering everything from pipeline construction to security automation to legacy system integration.
Featured Speakers
The workshop lineup included a range of practitioners from both vendors and end-user organizations:
- Oscar Medina — Developer Advocate, CloudBees
- Viktor Farcic — Jenkins X Product Manager, Principal Software Delivery Strategist and Developer Advocate, CloudBees
- Josh Grant — Solution Architect, Sauce Labs
- Robert Kelley — Director of Delivery Engineering, IHG
- Stuart Ashby — DevOps Specialist, Compuware
- Alex Taylor — DevOps Engineer, insightsoftware
Why This Matters for DevOps Teams
Events like CloudBees Connect serve as a practical reference point for teams evaluating their CI/CD maturity. The breadth of topics—from mainframe COBOL pipelines to Kubernetes-native delivery with Jenkins X—reflects the reality that DevOps teams operate across a wide spectrum of technology stacks and organizational maturity levels.
For teams building or improving their delivery pipelines, the key takeaways from the summit’s agenda are relevant beyond the event itself:
- Security should be a first-class concern in any CI/CD pipeline, not an afterthought.
- Feature flags decouple deployment from release, giving teams fine-grained control over what users see and when.
- Kubernetes and Jenkins X together lower the barrier to building scalable, cloud-native delivery workflows.
- Legacy systems (including COBOL) can and should be integrated into modern DevOps workflows using appropriate bridging tooling.