CloudBees Kubernetes Roadmap: The Journey Starts Today!

Today marks the first of a series of announcements we will be doing over the next few months to talk about our roadmap and commitment to Kubernetes.

But first, why does Kubernetes matter? In the last few years, we have seen the amazing growth of two phenomenons, cloud and containers, each reinforcing the other. Cloud providing the scale and instant on-demand customized infrastructure, while containers provided the fundamental Lego block that helps to unify the world of Dev and Ops in a very simple and lightweight fashion.

But a significant dichotomy still existed between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and containers: IaaS services were still very much offering a traditional IT view of the world, mimicking traditional computers, storage and network elements. While this is a good first iteration and puts operation teams relatively at ease, it doesn’t operate at the level that ultimately matters: applications. Businesses care about applications that help them differentiate themselves and create value. Business-wise, networking, compute and storage are necessary evils. Kubernetes helps solve that dichotomy elegantly by providing a “North API” (my wording) that’s all about applications! You can see Kubernetes as a IaaS tailored for applications. This North API makes sense to developers, it speaks to deployment and redeployment strategies, redundancy, scalability, etc. - those are directly applicable and valuable concepts to the business.

Then, a “South API” is focused on how Kubernetes actually gets deployed on infrastructure. For example, on the three big cloud providers, this South API is in bit part their problem: they are responsible for providing in-depth integration of Kubernetes with their infrastructure, making sure that as few choices as possible must be made by customers on how they want to operate their cluster, so they can focus on their business. Thanks to Kubernetes, the happy wedding of Dev and Ops is finally taking place. It will be a long road, but the destination is clear: Kubernetes is the new platform, the new cloud OS, it is the “Internet of Applications.” As a business, you can’t ignore what’s going on.

As such, at CloudBees, we have decided to fully embrace this phenomenon and help companies enter this new era. We recognize that some companies will have the flexibility to start from scratch and enter that era free of any constraint, but most companies won’t be in that situation and have a lot of existing investments they can’t simply ignore. For them, this will be a journey they will have to explicitly manage, with a foot in both worlds for a long time. Our product, services and partner strategy aims at enabling all of those different use cases through best of breed approaches, as well as guide and help customers through their unique journey

Part of the first announcement we are making today is that CloudBees has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, home of Kubernetes. This shows our commitment to Kubernetes and our intention to increasingly contribute to that ecosystem.

Our second announcement is the availability of our flagship offering, CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise, on Kubernetes. CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise is a platform based on Jenkins that provides a shared and centrally-managed continuous integration and continuous delivery service for enterprises. It provides a unified way to onboard, train and measure your teams and projects in a fully self-service fashion. Our newly released version of CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise has been reworked from the ground-up to provide in-depth integration with Kubernetes (this is not a mere arms-length integration). We will announce specific certified integrations throughout 2018.

If you are not deploying Kubernetes applications today, should you care about this? Yes, absolutely. The key concept to understand here is that CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise is not limited to Kubernetes deployments. Instead, CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise *leverages* a Kubernetes infrastructure to provide continuous integration and continuous delivery services to DevOps engineers. Most of the CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise users will NOT be aware that they are running on Kubernetes and might use it to do classic-style .Net or Java continuous integration/continuous delivery on traditional servers but, yet, they will still benefit from its flexibility, speed and elasticity.

So, if users are not necessarily aware of the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure, why should enterprises care? There are several reasons why enterprises should care:

• First, a number of organizations have started rolling out a Kubernetes strategy, either on-premise (by deploying Red Hat OpenShift, for example) or in the cloud (by deploying natively to Google Cloud or plan to do so on the future native services from AWS and Microsoft Azure). Because 99+% of their applications are developed and deployed on traditional IT layers, organizations know the move to an all-Kubernetes world will take time. Yet, they need to start “practicing that new Kubernetes muscle” now, so they can develop the right level of expertise. As such, CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise provides an amazing opportunity to leverage their investment and “build their Kubernetes muscle.” Our platform provides a best-of-breed integration with Kubernetes, will make your Kubernetes investment shine and will offer an immediate ROI on your investment.

• Second, if you haven’t made any significant investment in Kubernetes yet, this is the right place to start! Deploying CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise on Kubernetes means you’ll be ready to offer continuous integration and continuous delivery services to your users in both worlds: classic and next-generation cloud native. Continuous integration and continuous delivery is a *practice* you need to build across your organization. You want to have ONE and only ONE way to onboard, train and measure your teams. Ultimately, you won’t care whether teams are doing mobile development, back-end, web front-end, IoT, etc. As a business, you’ll care that you can onboard new team members, possibly move them from one team to the other, provide them with best-of-breed services and then measure your overall velocity to see where you can unlock more value. Deploying this continuous integration and continuous delivery service on Kubernetes ensures that you can serve all audiences, classic and new, in the best possible way.

(BTW, in case you have no investment in Kubernetes and don’t intend to, no problem. CloudBees still has a solution to fulfill your exact need.)

We will make additional announcements in the next weeks and months around our extensive Kubernetes strategy, now a key part of our DNA. And, while I won’t detail this today, I can already share with you that we are well advanced in building a new Kubernetes-native, continuous delivery solution. To achieve this, we have assembled a team of superstar developers, including James Strachan, James Rawlings and Robert Davies. This elite team has been behind some of the industry’s most successful open source projects such as the Groovy language, ActiveMQ (recently released as an official AWS service - Amazon MQ), Apache Camel/ServiceMix and most recently, fabric8. Our goal is not to simply offer the best continuous delivery solution for Kubernetes applications (i.e. not just operating on Kubernetes, but actually deploying native Kubernetes applications onto a Kubernetes cluster). Furthermore, and very importantly, the new offering will do it in a way that’s completely aligned with CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise: this means that as an organization you’ll be able to offer a centralized shared continuous delivery service that also provides a best-of-breed extension to develop on and deploy to Kubernetes.

CloudBees is essentially the only company that can provide you with a unified continuous integration/continuous delivery platform service, from on-premise to the cloud, as a Software as a Service (SaaS) or as a software distribution, from very small, small and medium size teams (thanks to Codeship by CloudBees) to medium, large and extra-large organizations (thanks to CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise), all under a single umbrella, that can all be measured and optimized through CloudBees DevOptics.

Now is the time to empower your teams and help them deliver more value to your business.

Onward,
Sacha

Sacha Labourey is the CEO and co-founder of CloudBees.

Sacha is a native of Switzerland. In 1999, he graduated from EPFL. While at EPFL, he started his first consulting business - Cogito Informatique. In 2001, he joined Marc Fleury’s JBoss project as a core contributor, and implemented JBoss’ original clustering features. Sacha went on to become GM for JBoss Europe. In 2005, he was appointed CTO, overseeing all of JBoss engineering. In June 2006, JBoss was acquired by Red Hat (NYSE:RHT). As CTO, Sacha played a crucial role in integrating and productizing the JBoss software with Red Hat offerings. In 2007, Sacha became co-general manager of Red Hat’s middleware division. He left Red Hat in 2009 and founded CloudBees in March 2010. Follow Sacha on Twitter.