DevOps World 2024: Celebrating 20 Years of Jenkins and Looking Ahead

At CloudBees, we were thrilled to host DevOps World Virtual 2024 on September 17, marking an extraordinary milestone: the 20th anniversary of Jenkins. As longtime contributors to the Jenkins project, this event was not only a celebration of its history but also a glimpse into the future of software delivery.

With a lineup of incredible speakers, including Jenkins creator and Launchable co-founder, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, we explored the evolution of DevOps, touching on topics most relevant to our DevOps community, from AI-augmented QA to the development of Apple Vision Pro applications.

The CloudBees team also took the stage to highlight Zero Downtime Jenkins and demonstrate how AI is revolutionizing DevOps with its AI Co-Pilot for Test Suite Intelligence and Optimization. These solutions help organizations efficiently manage and scale their CI/CD pipelines in the cloud and make it easier than ever to deliver high-quality software at speed.

DevOps World Virtual 2024 featured interactive sessions and workshops, offering valuable insights for both experienced DevOps professionals and those just starting their journey.

Let’s dive into the session highlights and key takeaways from this year’s event.

DevOps pioneers Kohsuke Kawaguchi and Sacha Labourey discussed the evolution of Jenkins and its ongoing impact on the field of DevOps. Their conversation, a highlight of DevOps World, explored the past, present, and future of software development in a world where cloud transformation and AI are rapidly reshaping the industry. Kohsuke shared his journey from focusing on fixing the dev-test loop bottleneck to his current vision of AI-augmented QA processes.

Key Takeaways from the Conversation:

• Community and Collaboration: Open-source projects such as Jenkins thrive on community involvement and collaboration.

• Evolution of DevOps: DevOps has evolved from a set of practices to a cultural shift that promotes collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement.

• AI's potential: AI can significantly enhance DevOps efficiency and effectiveness by automating tasks, providing insights, and improving decision-making – but AI should be used to augment human capabilities, not replace them.

• Team culture and collaboration: Building a strong team culture and fostering collaboration are essential for successful DevOps practices.

By combining technology, human expertise, and a collaborative culture, organizations can achieve new levels of efficiency, innovation, and success in their DevOps journeys.

Modern software development orgs are navigating numerous hurdles: increased pipeline complexity, hybrid and heterogeneous cloud environments, and a growing number of disparate tools. CloudBees is committed to building a platform that addresses today’s challenges—and anticipating the DevSecOps needs of tomorrow.

In this session, Shawn Ahmed, Chief Product Officer at CloudBees, joined teammates Runxia Ye (Senior Director, Product Management), Elliott Landon (Senior Product Manager), Landon Owens (Product Manager), and Harpreet Singh (VP, Product and Co-Head of AI) to discuss the new and upcoming features that will make CloudBees products even more powerful for future-ready DevSecOps. 

This all-star cast dove into:

• Pipeline Explorer: Bring visibility to your pipelines to identify what needs fixing.

• Launchable: Leverage a data-driven approach to reduce the noise and complexity of QA testing.

• Feature Management: Manage, release, and measure features at scale.

• Jenkins as a Service by CloudBees: Reduce complexity and headaches while increasing reliability.

Designing a platform for the future of software delivery means staying in lockstep with the needs of our customers. CloudBees is always looking for design partners and folks that are interested in our limited preview programs—reach out if you are interested!

Generative AI is everywhere. While skepticism and fear surround its future, this session reminded us that it's clearing away the “muck.” In other words, GenAI is paving the way for a next-generation developer experience that reduces tedious tasks and empowers 10x more productivity and 10x more builders through democratized development.

Rory Richardson, Director of Next Generation Developer Experience, led this session, focusing on Amazon Q—Amazon's powerful generative AI model, and its profound effects on developers and businesses. 

• Boosting Developer Productivity: Amazon Q automates tasks like documentation, unit tests, security code reviews, maintaining old code, and handling non-programmer requests.

• Democratizing Innovation: With its natural language interface, Amazon Q enables non-technical users to build applications, fostering creativity without coding expertise.

• Transforming Processes: Amazon’s Gen AI optimizes business functions such as data analysis, marketing content, and customer support, improving efficiency and decision-making.

• Ethical AI: Emphasizing responsible AI use, organizations must address bias, privacy, and fairness when adopting Amazon Q.

CloudBees complements Amazon Q by enhancing how users streamline and manage their CI/CD pipelines, aligning with our vision of reducing manual tasks and boosting productivity.

Troubleshooting complex pipelines is often time-consuming and tedious. As organizations grow, it’s not uncommon to find pipelines with tens of thousands of lines of code and log files that stretch into hundreds of megabytes—or even multiple gigabytes. CloudBees Pipeline Explorer, designed for speed and need, can help DevSecOps teams address these challenges.

Ray Kivisto, Sr. Principal Development Support Engineer, and Evan Dubay, Principal Customer Success Manager, discussed how Pipeline Explorer illuminates the unseen and transforms how developers and pipeline maintainers troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines.

In this session, Ray and Evan spotlighted Pipeline Explorer’s key features and benefits, including:

• Enhanced Navigation and Visualization: Tree and Map views for pipeline stages with intuitive UI.

• Large Log Performance: Swift navigation and high responsiveness even with extensive logs.

• Troubleshooting Tools: Built-in search and filter to jump to the exact point of failure in a pipeline.

• Collaborative Debugging: Sharing filters and log contexts to boost understanding and collaboration across large teams. 

Ray conducted a live demo to show the tool in action with a pipeline with 192,000 lines! In short, Evan and Ray emphasized how Pipeline Explorer simplifies the process of managing and troubleshooting your organization’s CI/CD pipelines.

In this session, Tim Jacomb, Jenkins Release Officer, and Jan Faracik, Lead Software Engineer, teamed up to walk users through some recent changes to Jenkins—and provide a glimpse into what’s coming next. 

Jenkins has long been a favorite tool for DevOps teams worldwide. To maintain that status and continuously meet the evolving needs of software developers, Jenkins’ interface received a facelift. Some of the changes included:

• Enhancing Pipeline Visualization: Inspired by BlueOcean, the new and improved Pipeline GraphView helps users visualize complex pipelines.

• Modernizing the Codebase: Evolving away from legacy frameworks such as Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library.

• Simplifying the User Experience: The new Builds Widget leverages modern CSS technologies to create a simpler and more responsive layout.

• Focusing on Refinement and Accessibility: Refined controls, updated language, and an improved color pallet generate a smoother and more intuitive workflow.

And more helpful changes are on the horizon! Coming down the pike will be a new Command Palette to enhance the search experience, tighter integration with Git for better version control, and an expanded App Bar and Widgets API to allow for more integrations and customizations.

Ever wondered how a tech giant reinvents its CI/CD processes? Aly Sabie from Siemens EDA provided an overview of the company’s journey to revamp its Jenkins infrastructure through four key projects:

• Migration to CloudBees CI: Siemens transitioned from CloudBees Enterprise Jenkins to CloudBees CI, gaining access to new features and improved efficiency while ensuring a smooth, disruption-free migration.

• Containerization: Moving to Docker containers simplified maintenance and increased portability, addressing challenges related to operating system updates on physical servers.

• Version Upgrades: Regular updates to CloudBees CI were implemented to avoid stability issues and leverage the latest features, with CloudBees providing essential support throughout the process.

• High Availability: An active/active configuration was introduced to eliminate single points of failure, enhancing reliability and minimizing downtime.

Aly emphasized the importance of collaboration with CloudBees, which included regular meetings and proactive enhancement proposals. Siemens' successful modernization efforts underscore the critical role of innovative technologies and strong partnerships in advancing CI/CD pipelines.

DevOps teams face a constant push-and-pull; they’re under pressure to release features faster, but the traditional QA process can easily become a bottleneck. Naturally, organizations increasingly turn to AI-augmented quality assurance tools to help alleviate the whiplash. 

In this demo-driven session, the Co-heads of AI at CloudBees, Harpreet Singh (VP, Product) and Kohsuke Kawaguchi (VP, Engineering), showcased a handful of unique workflows flows within Launchable by CloudBees that help improve the dev-test iteration loop, including:

• Triaging test failures using GenAI

• Conducting a QA “morning” routine

• Keeping test suites healthy

• Using ML to reduce test execution time

Harpreet and Kohsuke walked through these use cases to show how Launchable’s AI-powered QA testing features are helping organizations reduce cloud costs and save up to 2,000 developer hours per month.

When EC2 Mac Instances and Jenkins join forces, the result can be powerful for developers. 

David Siederer, Senior Specialist Solutions Architect, EC2 Mac, Amazon Web Services, led this session, leaning on his 25+ years of professional experience with Apple products and infrastructure. In the session, David touched on:

• The power of Amazon EC2 Mac instances and Jenkins in streamlining the development and deployment of Apple Apps.

• How to build a unified CI/CD pipeline that integrates Jenkins with XCode, Fastlane, and other development tools.

• Best practices, real-world use cases, and demonstrations to help developers optimize workflows and accelerate time to market with Apple apps.

As the Apple ecosystem continues to grow with new platforms such as Vision Pro, leveraging scalable cloud solutions like EC2 Mac Instances will be key to staying ahead in the competitive world of app development.

Everyone’s talking about the Apple Vision Pro. But what about the application build pipelines that help fuel this exciting tech? 

This session featured not one—but two—great minds from Amazon Web Services. Sergey Kurson, Principal Solutions Architect, brought expertise from his 15+ years in the IT industry, including numerous projects in the gaming industry. Masashi Tamooka, Senior Prototyping Engineer, worked in the mobile game industry for three years before joining the team at AWS.

Sergey and Masashi covered:

• How customers have established elastic, scalable, and secure application build pipelines for Vision Pro and other Apple platforms, or Safari with Unity and Jenkins on AWS.

• How to build streamlined pipelines so that source code, app build, test, and release are all placed in a single environment.

Spatial computing is the future, and Jenkins is ready to support!

At DevOps World, CloudBees highlighted its groundbreaking Zero Downtime Jenkins High Availability/Horizontal Scalability solution. This innovative offering promises to revolutionize CI/CD pipeline management with features like active/active replication, automated failover, rolling upgrades, and horizontal scaling. 

Bill Garrett, Principal Solution Architect, and Ian Kurtz, Global Sales Engineer at CloudBees, demonstrated how these capabilities ensure uninterrupted Jenkins operations, enhancing reliability and performance while simplifying management.

The CloudBees CI solution offers substantial benefits: continuous availability of Jenkins environments, optimized resource use, faster job execution, and reduced operational costs. By automating scaling and centralizing infrastructure management, CloudBees CI minimizes downtime and allows developers to concentrate on their work without interruptions. This powerful tool keeps your Jenkins environment running smoothly and accelerates software delivery, making it a crucial asset for teams aiming to deliver high-quality software quickly and efficiently. 

If you want to learn more, schedule time with us.

It’s time to move beyond the buzzwords and turn DevSecOps into a practical tool for achieving business outcomes. This session aimed to unlock DevSecOps’ true potential—leaving attendees with a clear roadmap for assessing the impact of their DevSecOps initiatives and optimizing them for more business value. 

Led by Sunil Mavadia, Field CTO, and Mark Maxwell, Principal Sales Engineer, the session covered strategies for identifying value drivers, setting objectives, and measuring performance to maximize DevSecOps impact. Attendees gained actionable practices to enhance security, efficiency, and collaboration in their organizations.

Key takeaways include:

• Identifying Value: DevSecOps impacts risk mitigation, faster time to market, better quality, cost efficiency, compliance, and team collaboration. Focusing on these drivers maximizes benefits.

• Setting Objectives: Use SMART goals to align DevSecOps efforts with business strategy and track success.

• Implementing Key Practices: Integrate security early in the development lifecycle (shift-left security), automate security testing, treat security as code, and foster collaboration to improve efficiency and security.

• Measuring Performance: Use metrics such as deployment frequency, vulnerabilities, repair time, and customer satisfaction to evaluate DevSecOps.

• Continuous Optimization: Regularly adjust strategies based on feedback and stay updated on trends to sustain DevSecOps value.

Sunil and Mark concluded with a challenge for attendees to gather the right metrics for their DevSecOps evolution. Contact CloudBees to understand the business value of what DevSecOps can do for your organization!

What does the future hold for Jenkins as it faces a shift in growth patterns and contributor trends? The Jenkins Community Board (JCB) shed light on the state of the ecosystem in 2024, highlighting growth areas, challenges, and initiatives to sustain momentum.

It was revealed that while Jenkins jobs have steadily increased, the growth in new controller installations has slowed. The community has adapted well to Java upgrades, but the number of individual contributors is declining, reflecting broader open-source trends. 

The JCB is tackling these issues by focusing on retaining contributors and maintaining plugins. Key challenges, such as infrastructure sustainability and compatibility with upgrades, are central to their future plans. To address these, the board is prioritizing both modernization and community outreach, ensuring continued growth and resilience for the Jenkins ecosystem.

At DevOps World 2024, the spotlight has been on transformation—whether it’s marking 20 years of Jenkins or exploring how AI-augmented QA and AWS tools are shaping the future of development. The forward-thinking mindset is driving this change, helping teams to innovate more quickly and effectively.

As we ride the wave of transformation and innovation in our industry, why not take the next step in revolutionizing your development process? Discover how CloudBees can be a game-changer for your team—whether you're looking to streamline CI/CD, boost productivity, or harness the power of cutting-edge tools. Request a demo today and see how CloudBees can elevate your workflows and drive your success. 

The DevOps World 2024 journey is still ongoing! Be sure to join us at the upcoming tour dates: 

1. Jersey City on November 12, 2024

2. Santa Clara, CA on November 14, 2024

3. London, UK on November 26, 2024