CD Foundation Announces CDEvents, a vendor-neutral specification for defining the format of event data

SAN FRANCISCO, May 17, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), the open source software foundation that seeks to improve the world's capacity to deliver software with security and speed, today announced it is hosting the CDEvents project, a vendor-neutral specification for defining the format of event data to provide interoperability across services, platforms and systems.

Today's CI/CD systems do not talk to each other in a standardized way. Defining a standard set of specifications is critical in solving the interoperability issues across the continuous delivery (CD) ecosystem. Having a common format for events in the CD space will enable an ecosystem of tools to collect, store, visualize and analyze events across CD platforms. This will cover use cases like measuring DevOps metrics and performance and visualizing end-to-end workflows, from the initial development all the way to operations and remediation flows.

The current release of the CDEvents specification is available here: https://github.com/cdevents

"The modern software factory relies on several components that power the development, building, testing, deployment and monitoring of complex applications. CDEvents facilitates interoperability between these systems by providing a shared dictionary for describing artifacts and their metadata," said Andrea Frittoli, Open Source Developer Advocate at IBM, co-creator of the CDEvents project and member of the CDF Technical Oversight Committee. "CDEvents open the doors to scalable and decoupled integrations within the software supply chain and create the potential for greater visibility and measurability of continuous delivery workflows."

The lack of a common way of describing events means developers must constantly re-learn how to consume events. This also limits the potential for libraries, tooling and infrastructure to aid the delivery of event data across environments, like SDKs, event routers or tracing systems.

"The Continuous Delivery Foundation is actively improving the developer experience. CDEvents increases interoperability between CI/CD tools and enables greater automation and observability within CI/CD systems. The CDEvents specification has broad applicability and is a great example of how the Continuous Delivery Foundation aims to help practitioners of CI/CD, regardless of industry or company," said Kara de la Marck, Senior Ecosystem Advocate for the CD Foundation. "Help us build better tools. Test the CDEvents specification for yourself!"

CDEvents has received a large amount of industry interest with contributors from many of the major CI/CD tools providers as well as from end-user companies. There exists a Proof of Concept implementation proving that Tekton and Keptn can communicate over a common event protocol.

Supporting Quotes:

"CDEvents specification, based on CloudEvents, provides the CI/CD ecosystem with a unified way to send and receive events happening inside the modern system that may potentially include dozens of different tools and implementations. It is a great step towards Interoperability of the components in this space, and also towards Open Observability and transparency of software supply chain. On behalf of the CDF Technical Oversight Committee, I would like to thank the CDF Events SIG, and all contributors to the specification and to the implementation. We are looking forward to adopting the standard in Keptn and Jenkins communities."
– Oleg Nenashev, CDF TOC Chair, Jenkins and Keptn maintainer

DeployHub
"Imperative CD Pipelines have become the bottleneck for teams managing thousands of independently deployed services in a component-driven architecture. CDEvents disrupts this model. It brings us closer to a fast and easy way to stand up a pipeline for each independent component using a declarative 'listener' model. CDEvents is driving a new way to orchestrate thousands of services flowing through the pipeline process in a cloud-native architecture."
– Tracy Ragan, CEO DeployHub, Inc.

Ericsson
"The introduction of new technologies/methodologies results in tremendous changes in the industries, and telecommunications is not an exception. The openness and disaggregation enable new ways of how products and services are developed, delivered, and deployed. This results in increased complexity when it comes to large scale end-to-end software flows, involving thousands of developers, which could start from the vendor and end in an operator's network, requiring a fresh approach to CI/CD as well. CDEvents is a key initiative to enable establishing software flows that allows deployments of new products and services to public and private clouds as well as on-premise hardware, which potentially use different CI/CD tools and technologies in which interoperability is a key concern."
– Kristofer Hallén, CI Tools Architect, Ericsson

Dynatrace
Building complex day one and day two application orchestration is challenging by itself. Having to deal with a lot of different API and data formats simply adds to this challenge. At Dynatrace we started to standardize around events as part of the Keptn project. CDEvents is now taking this to the next level, by establishing an industry-wide standard. Dynatrace is committed to supporting this from day one.
– Alois Reitbauer, Chief Product Officer Cloud Automation Dynatrace, Co-Chair CNCF TAG App Delivery

doWhile/VolvoCars
"Many industries are introducing more and more software into their previously mostly-hardware products and ecosystems. Autonomous vehicles are a good example of this, with both highly complex and safety-critical software spread out over embedded systems, in-vehicle computers and cloud services. Finding a 'one CI/CD tool fits all' solution for such a wide variety of needs and processes is not the way forward, interoperability between different solutions is. CDEvents will enable interoperability, observability and collaboration between both systems and teams, and will help high-complexity development projects keep track of everything that has been built, how it has been verified and what the current operational status is."
– Erik Sternerson, CI Specialist, Volvo Cars / Volvo Autonomous Solutions / doWhile

For more information on the CDEvents project, see https://cdevents.dev/

Additional CDEvents Resources

• Main repo
• Main CDEvents site
• CDEventsCon, May 17, 2022, in Valencia, Spain
• How to contribute to CDEvents via issues and pull request

Additional CD Foundation Resources

• Join CDF
• Contact CDF
• CDF Projects
• CDF FAQ
• CDF Twitter
• CDF Blog
• cdCon 2022

About the Continuous Delivery Foundation

The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) seeks to improve the world's capacity to deliver software with security and speed. The CDF is a vendor-neutral organization that is establishing best practices of software delivery automation, propelling education and adoption of CD tools, and facilitating cross-pollination across emerging technologies. The CDF is home to many of the fastest-growing projects for CD, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Tekton, and Spinnaker. The CDF is part of the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about the CDF, please visit https://cd.foundation.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact:
Jesse Casman
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SOURCE CD Foundation