CloudBees is a centralized management solution that provides the services of Software Delivery Automation (SDA) and Software Delivery Management (SDM). In the past, CloudBees was a platform as a cloud service (PaaS) provider. Now it supports the software integrations, software delivery automation, and software delivery management. CloudBees helps businesses to improve their business models, services, and overall efficiency. CloudBees’ services include multiple plugins that can be divided into five main categories; High Availability, Continuous Delivery, Large Implementations, Security and Optimized Utilizations.
CloudBees is considering overhauling its technology portfolio in 2020, following a series of acquisitions that saw it grow beyond its roots in the Jenkins group. CloudBees is the primary supporter of Jenkins open source CI/CD platform, introducing its own company version as CloudBees Core. It has acquired a small number of other companies over the past couple of years, including cloud-based CI/CD vendor Codeship. Earlier this year, it acquired Electric Cloud’s release automation company, followed by feature flag provider Rollout. The continuous Integrations service of CloudBees tests the changes in the code to find the errors, defects, and other flaws or imperfections. It repeats its testing algorithms and ensures the efficiency of the code. When it finds any error or flaw in the code it tries to sort that out as soon as possible. Junkin is the tool that CloudBees use for the development and testing of apps and different software.
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Jenkins Tool
Jenkins is an open source automation tool that is written in Java language. Jenkins can be set up to analyze for the code change. Jenkins was originally written in 2004 by Kohsuke Kawaguchi for continuous integration, it means it was responsible to analyze the change in the code; whether the code is fault or flawless to improve the efficiency of the code and remove the manual effort [3]. CloudBees is the most prominent contributor to the Jenkins community [3]. Continuous Integrations; helps in reducing cost, saves time, and improves the overall efficiency. With Continuous Integrations companies automate their manual jobs [1]. Among all that, it launched the first Jenkins X update, the Kubernetes based on the CI/CD project it’s backing up, and revealed the new Application Delivery Management strategy. Jenkins X and otherwise, dominated the schedule at the vendor’s DevOps World/Jenkins World shindig in a cold Lisbon earlier this month, with some of the newly acquired products, such as Flow and Rollout, apparently lost on the agenda.
The critical features included in its initial release by the distribution of CloudBees are to allow teams to preview environments after developers build or upgrade a pull-request in git. To get going, the cluster needs to have installed and configured the necessary resources, and Jenkins X configured in an existing cluster with the command jx boot. Or, in GKE, users can also have a Kubernetes cluster with the command jx create cluster gke.
CloudBees is offering the ability to build Jenkins X pipelines among other important features. Jenkins X uses the Tekton open source project to announce and run Kubernetes based CI / CD pipelines. A description of a pipeline resides in the Jenkins-x.yml file in YAML format from the project repository. For example , users specify the form of pipeline, processing merges to the master branch; and the lifecycle of development to determine the steps for designing, reviewing, and releasing the application.
For users trying to create a CI/CD pipeline for an existing application, CloudBees provides prompt start support through the jx create quickstart command using pre-configured templates for a small range of languages such as Go, Node.js or Java. If they don’t already exist, the quickstart command can take charge of generating stuff like the Dockerfile, the jenkins-x.yml file and the helm map. It will also make sure to setup a webhook to activate the CI/CD pipeline automatically on the remote git repository. Quickstarts use build packs to create and deploy Kubernetes software, based on the draft open-source project.
Distribution of CloudBees also requires support via HashiCorp Vault for managing security and authentication tools. Distribution of CloudBees installs and configures Vault when building cluster by chance. Jenkins X uses Vault to store its secrets such as GitHub keys or GitOps secrets, but developers can use secrets with the jx get command in the CI/CD pipeline as well. CloudBees plans to provide an upgraded interface UI in the future updates of Jenkins X, support external cloud services, such as AWS EKS, and support DevPods allowing developers to use a pod as a terminal to test their applications directly into Kubernetes.
Software Delivery Management
The core purpose of Software Delivery Management (SDM) is to uncover the real potential of the software value delivery [2]. Every software company wants to become the best software company. Along with startups, big tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc. are bringing updates to their customers more frequently for better user experience [4]. They have to ensure that their updates are flawless but it is very difficult to analyze the code quickly at a large scale. It takes more time, more effort however; with Software Delivery Management (SDM) tool the deployment of the software has become more efficient. It reduced the effort, cost, and the time.
There are four pillars of Software Delivery Management that ensure the efficiency of this tool;
- Common Data: To facilitate the shared processes, processes, and collaborations all the information in the software delivery activity is captured and then stored in the common data model.
- Universal Insights: Within the organization the universal insights refer to the insights that help taking important decisions based on the data and help employees to learn and understand from the data.
- Common Processes: Common processes refer to the delivery functions that help in bringing ideas to market efficiently with maximum value and adoption.
- All Functions Collaboration: To boost the value creation efforts, all functions within the software delivery organization work together. It ensures the overall quality of services as well [5].
References
https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/CloudBees
https://www.cloudbees.com/blog/software-delivery-management-game-changer
https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/what-is-jenkins
https://www.cloudbees.com/blog/introducing-software-delivery-management
