The demand for integrated software solutions that enable or enhance Department of Defense (DoD) weapons and business systems has never been greater. The National Defense Strategy calls for building “a more lethal, resilient, and rapidly innovating Joint Force...[because] we face an ever more lethal and disruptive battlefield, combined across domains, and conducted at increasing speed and reach.” To rise to this challenge, the DoD invests in software factories to directly and rapidly translate warfighter needs into secure, production-capable software. The resulting software must incorporate a robust risk management framework (RMF), while at the same time be rapidly deployable. This is where the Platform One Big Bang approved environment comes in. Platform One is at the heart of the DoD software factory ecosystem, providing approved tools and kubernetes environments that meet DoD authority to operate standards. This allows for the transformation of DoD software acquisition into secure, responsive software factories that utilize modern software development processes and tools that are enhanced and quickened through automation.
That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that CloudBees CI is now a supported third-party integration option in the Air Force’s Platform One Big Bang DevSecOps platform baseline. This integration will provide freedom of choice for platform users and increase adoption of Platform One by increasing optionality for CI tooling for Platform One, the Air Force, and the entire DoD. This allows users to keep the tools they love and use the tools that are best suited for their software development in a fully integrated way.
What is Platform One
Platform One is a modern, cloud-era platform that provides valuable tooling, hosts CI/CD DevSecOps pipelines, and offers a secure Kubernetes platform for hosting microservices. This platform was made more readily available to other organizations by offering Big Bang - an open sourced version of the DoD battle tested Platform One. Big Bang is the most used government DevSecOps platform with thousands of users across the DoD.
Platform One CI Tooling
Platform One was created to be vendor agnostic, however overtime it became very opinionated which restricted programs across DoD from adopting the platform. Previous CI tool limitations such as lack of third party integrations and support for legacy and embedded platforms created difficulties for those users who needed these features to support their developments. This led to the need of offering an additional CI tool (Cloudbees CI) to meet the users’ requirements. The integration of CloudBees CI will end an important vendor lock-in for CI tooling, providing those programs with freedom of choice and expanding the offerings within Platform One. This is expected to drive additional demand to Platform One as a result of our integration work.
Largest CI Platform Globally
CloudBees CI is built on Jenkins, the most used tech stack for CI for government agencies with over 15 million monthly users globally. CloudBees’ vast ecosystem of integrations allow consumers to define and leverage best-of-breed tools that support their mission, from cloud native deployments to legacy embedded systems. Additionally, CloudBees CI brings in unique large scale management and built-in security that help developers focus on building and delivering effective software, while providing powerful risk mitigation, compliance, and governance capabilities.
Benefit through Freedom of Choice
Integration means less configuration for DoD programs who want to use CloudBees CI, increased adoption of a secure enterprise version of Jenkins in CloudBees CI, and further adoption of Big Bang environments across the DoD. This will allow CloudBees technology to be more easily accredited and integrated with government customers using their existing and intended baselines.
This is timely because a DoD environment called Di2E, which offered Jenkins, is shutting down and will cause programs to migrate to a new solution. With the added choices we are building into the Platform One Big Bang environments, we are providing an alternative home for those programs.
We believe CloudBees will enable DoD programs to automate the application development and accreditation processes using DevSecOps to build and maintain applications for the warfighter, securely and at scale.
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Secure DevOps Solutions for Government Agencies