CDF SIG Interoperability Chair, Cloudbees & Puppet Discuss Interoperability

Panelist include: 

• Kara de la Marck, Jenkins X Community Manager at Cloudbees
• Fatih Degirmenci, SIG Interoperability Chair at CDF
• Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO at Puppet

Organizations often employ more than one tool in various stages of their CI/CD pipelines due to different capabilities provided by the tools and this is perhaps one of the biggest benefits users get by using open technologies for their CI/CD needs. However, one of the challenges users face is the lack of interoperability across the CI/CD tools and technologies, resulting in various issues while constructing and running pipelines such as passing metadata and artifacts between the tools or achieving traceability from commit to deployment. Often users end up building their “own glue code” to address what is a common problem, further complicating moving from one tool to another and adopting new technologies and methodologies.

These “glue code solutions” are generally specific to users’ needs and tools rather than being loosely coupled and agnostic to tooling and technology. Additionally these solutions are not visible to other users and the communities, making them vulnerable to the risk of outage in their CI/CD pipelines due to potential changes (i.e. non-backward changes to the APIs, changes in data models) that happen to the tools in respective projects.

Therefore, focusing on tool interoperability is critical. The Continuous Delivery Foundation highlighted interoperability as one of the Foundation's 9 goals. The Interoperability special interest group (SIG) was founded as the forum for driving towards this goal.