Software delivery platform provider CloudBees is looking to establish the category of software delivery management, to address siloed development processes, as well as to make the open source Jenkins CI/CD system available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering.

Software delivery management via SaaS

CloudBees’s planned SaaS-based SDM platform would tie together all artifacts, data, and events across an organization’s devops tool chain into a unified system of record. The goal is to improve collaboration between teams by providing universal insights, connected processes, and governance.

SDM coordinates software delivery in an organization, serving as a sort of CRM for software delivery. The idea for SDM arose out of the notion that once companies use CI/CD, they realize they have created silos of data, processes, and teams. SDM is intended to capture signals from all the tools in use to show what is taking place.

Expected by 2020, the planned capabilities of CloudBees SDM include:

A product hub, for integrated visibility and orchestration of data.

A policy and rules engine.

An efficiency dashboard to support team improvement and retrospectives.

Real-time value stream management, to provide visibility to in feature and contribution status and value delivery blockages.

Integrated feature flag management, for policy-driven delivery control based on operational metrics.

Jenkins X goes SaaS

Jenkins X, a cloud-native version of the Jenkins CI/CD system for cloud applications on Kubernetes, will be offered via SaaS by CloudBees by 2020.

Using the Tekton framework as a pipeline-execution engine, Jenkins X provides pipeline automation, gitops (which combines the Git software version control system with Kubernetes), and preview environments for team collaboration.

The SaaS service follows CloudBees’s own commercial distribution of the open source Jenkins X; the CloudBees distribution includes commercial technical support and monthly updates, supports Google Kubernetes Engine and preview environments, and is planned to support Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and DevPods.

The Jenkins base may get upgrades

Separately, the base Jenkins platform, now 15 years old and orginally called Hudson when created by Sun Microsystems, may gain improvements around scalability, administration, and ease of use, said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the founder of Jenkins and chief scientist at CloudBees.