Embracing Open Source with CDEvents – The CD Pipeline EP16

Hey everyone, this is Alan Hummel for Techstrong, and you are watching another edition of CD Pipelines. CD Pipeline is a, uh, monthly video series put on by us here at Techstrong in partnership with our friends at the Continuous Delivery Foundation, the CDF. And, uh, we're gonna tell you a little bit about the CDF in just a moment.

So if you're not familiar with it, not to worry, we'll get you familiar with it. But basically, we every month pick another topic of interest to those in the world of continuous delivery, CICD, DevOps, and, um, explore it a bit. We've looked at the various projects that are under the CD f umbrella that they manage and own.

Uh, we've looked at trends in the market and how some of the mega trends are affecting cd, just about anything that that touches on cd. Uh, we unfortunately, I, you know, taping or recording no one tapes anything anymore. Who am I kidding recording this?

Uh, right after, uh, AWS re event last week, we've lost a person or two from our panel. Uh, so as we call it, the AWS Reinfect Kind of Syndrome where people get sick. So our co-host, Lori Larussa, is, is not available to us today.

She is under the weather, as is, we think, the DC sonika, who actually happens to also be the chairperson, uh, for the CDF. So we hope both of them are feeling better, and we'll have them on at our next CD pipeline show. But the show must go on as some famous someone said at one point.

So let let us March on. Let me introduce you to our, uh, panel members today. First of all, uh, well joining us, he's the open source advocate at IBM, Andrea Oli, Fri Bri, not Fri Fri.

What is that, Andrea? Welcome. And I, I said you were an open source advocate at IBM, but maybe you can add some more color to that for us.

Thanks, Alan. It's great to be here. Yes.

So I work at a VMA software engineer and developer advocate. I focus on open source and as part of my open source, um, job and work that I do, uh, I serve, uh, for the Continuous Delivery Foundation for the CDF as chair of the Technical Oversight Committee. And I'm a, as well, a, a member of the governing board.

And, but I'm a software engineer, uh, and I'm involved in maintaining some of the projects within the CDF and I co-founded the CD events project that we're talking about today. Wonderful. And thank you.

Thank you for what you do, you volunteering as well. Next, I want to introduce you to Gerard Mc Maho. I messed that up, but Gerard correct me please.

Uh, so it is Ger McMahan, as we say, over here in Ireland, and Yes, Gerard McMahan. Gerard, why don't you introduce yourself? Thank you, Alan.

Um, so my name is J McMahan. I work for Fidelity Investments and I'm part of the CDF governing board, representing the end user members. And my role here in Fidelity is heading up what we call a LM Tools and Platforms.

So providing the tools, the platforms, and the services for all of our developers at Fidelity to, to, you know, to build their code, write their code builder, their code tester code, and deploy their code to our customers. Okay. Thank you and welcome Gerard.

Uh, last but certainly not least is Ben Powell. Hey, Ben, how are you doing? Doing good.

How about you, Alan? Very well, thank you, Ben. Why don't you introduce yourself?

Cool. Yeah, So I am a software engineer at Apple. Uh, so I work primarily on continuous delivery tools.

Uh, prior to that I was actually at AWS, uh, speaking of reinvent, um, I was on the SDKs and tools, uh, team and then eventually ECS. So a lot of experience, uh, in that regard. Um, so I, um, I'm maintainer of the CD events, uh, Oregon and repos as well.

So I help kind of facilitate, uh, the spec as well as, um, a sig lead for the implementation sig a part of CD events. Excellent. All right.

Um, so guys, I, I feel it necessary for people who maybe are catching this show CD pipeline for the first time. We've been doing CD pipeline for more than a year, maybe going on two, but for people who are familiar with the Continuous Delivery Foundation or the CD Foundation as sometimes we refer to it, or CDF, which seems to be the new, the preferred nomenclature these days, right? The CDF is a, I call it a daughter foundation of the Linux Foundation.

So it's under the Linux Foundation umbrella, and it is, it was set up specifically to focus in on the continuous delivery market and, and it, uh, community and, uh, you know, perhaps its biggest job is managing, you know, I think is it eight or nine projects that have been donated given to fostered under the CDF umbrella among, which is the CD events project that we're gonna talk about today, but also some, some kind of household names in the tech world. Jenkins for one, um, oh, I'm Jori Ga Blake, my goodness. Netflix, Google sticker, spin Spinnaker for two.

Um, who you are all board members here? What, what are the other projects under the CDF umbrella? Well, we have project like Screwdriver, uh, for instance, and Jenkins and Spinnaker that you mentioned.

We have tacton, uh mm-hmm. Um, yeah, the city events protest and what else? We have, uh, Jenkin Sachs.

Yeah. Um, Which is also GitHubs in the GitHubs area. Uh, yeah.

Excellent. I mean, it's some, you know, and, and our audience is DevOps and cloud native folks and cybersecurity, and so these are kind of very well known projects and tools to, to the audience. Um, again, before we, I should also mention that the, uh, CDF recently announced their annual conference, which is coming up, actually, Gerard, do you maybe have some of the, uh, particulars on that one?

Yeah, so CD Con has been running as a kind of pre-con micro conference as part of the open source summit in, um, north America. So this year it'll be on, in June in Denver on the 23rd to the 25th. So we look forward.

That's fine. Do you wants to come participate? I think there was a call for speakers open at this point, isn't there?

Yes. org? So it's CD Foundation.

CD Foundation, excuse me. Yeah. Yep.

Excellent. Just wanted to get that out there. Alrighty, folks, if it's okay, then let's turn to our topic at hand today, which is to get people aware and familiar with, uh, a project under the CDF umbrella called CD Events Project.

Andrea, you mentioned you were one of the co-founders of this, so if it's okay, I'd like to start it off with you and give us kind of the background. What is CD events, what kind of drove you to wanting to, you know, make this project? And we could go from there, Right?

Um, yeah, thanks, Alan. Um, so, um, I mean, we, we started in the, of course, in the continuous delivery landscape, but more generally, uh, what we call the software factory. So looking at, you know, the, the software, how it's built, starting from source all the way to, to production.

Um, and there we, we have a number of tools that are involved in these. Um, you have your CD tools, your CI tools, your, uh, software management, uh, systems, your deployment system, and so forth. Um, and there are several options for all these tools, and a lot of them are hosted by, by the CDF as we discussed before, but others are also hosted by other foundation.

Um, but, uh, what we notice is that there is a lot of fragmentation in how these tools are set up in the data models they use and how they, they talk to each other. And so, um, the CDF project, we created it basically try and address this, this fragmentation and bring interoperability in this space, right? So we want to, um, make it possible for these, uh, tools to, to talk to each other, to generate data that can be processed, uh, seamlessly across the different tools and, you know, make it easier for organization that use many of these tools to not have to reinvent the wheels and, you know, integrate them these tools with each other or, um, inhouse all the time.

So, but yeah, mainly we want to bring interoperability in this space, and that's how seed events was, was born and seed event itself as a project, is it a specification? And so it basically defines, um, formats for events that can be produced and consumed by, by tools in this space. And expand a little bit to kinda give it a little bit more of a, some concreteness like, uh, imagine you have like your whole, let's say you're a company and you have your whole SDLC, which is software development lifecycle, um, architecture, you know, you have all these services and tools running, and let's say you want to actually add or even switch out a tool to do that today, it's very, very difficult.

You're gonna spend, you know, months, maybe even years, just try to get to that place where you are at to just deploy that software again, at the same, same level or same criteria. So with the goal CD events, as, as Andrea has had alluded to, is, is interoperability. So you're, you're, our goal is to be able to just be able to pick up pieces and just put new pieces in very easily and transparently.

Absolutely. So, but when we say it's a spec, I don't wanna lessen what CD events project is, right? It's, it's, it's more than a spec.

Is that fair to say? Um, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the project started with a specification, uh, but we went on to implement a number of SDKs or software development kits that can be used by the different tools to Make it easy To, you know, consume the events or produce them, validate them, and so forth.

And, uh, more recently the, the project expanded even further, uh, through one of the, um, working groups that May Ben mentioned earlier, that is sharing that, uh, it's the implementation working group, because of course it's nice to, to have a specification, but, you know, we want to actually provide guidance, uh, on how to go about implementing it and, you know, benefiting from, from this, uh, interoperability, um, that we're setting up. Yeah, and Alan, I, I add to that, and I totally agree, it's far more, or allows it, it creates a framework or a way to, to go much further. So, you know, for a company like Fidelity, you know, using CD events, you know, allows us to express, you know, all of the different events that happen across the L-S-D-L-C into a common form, and then allows us to be able to have conversations across all of those events in a very consistent and common way, um, helping us, you know, join events, you know, from disparate systems and allows us then to say, you know, how do we measure governance?

How we, how we might measure compliance, how do we ensure that codes being created, built and tested according to the kind of our standards and the kind of the specifications. So LD might have, or any, any enterprise might have, and re CD events allows us to express those events in a way that it can achieve those outcomes. Fair.

Um, You know, look, I think all of us on here are very familiar with how open source communities work. Not everyone watching this is gonna be as familiar though. Let's talk a little bit about the relationship between like CDF and how it sponsors this particular project and where kind of rubber meets the road with the broader community.

Do, do you know what I'm saying? I mean, it's one thing for the CDF to say, okay, we, we are gonna sponsor CD events and we're gonna, you know, have people like Andre or on our board who are kind of co-founding it, but in terms of growing the community in terms of, you know, make breathing life into a day, day by day, it's not the CDF per se that's doing that, right? It's the maintainers, it's the, the community as we say.

Can you give us a sense of the size of the community, of the involvement of the community here? Aja, I hate to put it on you, but you are, you know, you are one of the glad, Um, you know, growing, uh, growing a community, uh, is a continuous effort. And, but we've been lucky, uh, with a, with a great community, um, in, in the city events project.

I mean, we, we've had like, uh, early adopters from the beginning, like, uh, uh, friends, uh, you know, Gerard and, and Ben here that, uh, started at the early days, uh, contributing to the project, uh, components as to the specification and, you know, taking it on and starting adopting it and, you know, bringing the, the invaluable feedback back to the community. So, um, yeah, and we, we have, uh, a core group of, uh, contributors that, uh, are kind of always within the project, you know, helping, facilitating the working groups and con bringing the discussion on. And then we have other, we have had other companies that maybe joined the project, they're interested in a specific career, contribute some to the project, and then, you know, take that home and, uh, may contribute later in the future.

But yeah, so we, we, we have, uh, several companies that contributed over time. So we had, um, Ericson contributing, uh, a lot of, um, a lot of the, uh, specifications and SDKs. We have companies like Cube, uh, cube Shop, Bloomberg, and Red Hat, uh, do while, so SAS.

So we have many companies involved in each, you know, contributing to different areas and, um, other, the project itself. Yeah, And one thing I wanna, I wanna add to that as well, 'cause it's more on the open source side of that, is, um, so generally with open source, you have this concept called like working groups or SIGs, uh, which are special interest groups. And so these are like, you know, some sort of timeframe meetings.

So it's like every week, every couple weeks, every month, you know, it could be any sort of allocated amount of time for any sort of, um, for any sort of period. Um, so with these groups, the maintainers and anyone that's interested in the project can join these calls. So these calls are completely public.

You can just go to a GitHub repo and, um, you know, we'll, we'll establish ones and find a calendar, which will have these meetings. And then you can just hop in, you can hop in and just start participating. So we encourage anyone that's interested in open source to go ahead and do that.

Just go to any sort of interesting, uh, repo that you find that you wanna contribute to and just attend. You don't even have to speak. You can just attend.

And we're always looking for maintainers. We're always looking for more people to join. So, you know, feel free to go to CD events, take a look at our calendars, and please, please, uh, show up.

We'll, we'll, we'll encourage the discussions. Absolutely. Gentlemen, if it's okay, I'd like to pivot a little bit.

Look, it's December, it's the end of the year. Everybody's forward thinking, what does 2025 look like? What is 2025 gonna bring in ways in, you know, in ways of technologies and ways of business, in ways of, it's a crazy time in the world.

There's wars and there's regime change and there's elections and just, you know, it's, it's, it's a busy, crazy time in our world now, CD events. You know, someone once told me, don't do anything if it's not going to be big enough, right? It's gonna have, if it doesn't have the potential to be impactful, don't waste your time.

See the events as a project that has tremendous potential to, to be impactful, really help our organization streamline their, their pipelines, their delivery pipelines and collaboration. As you look at 2025, where do you think kind of the promise or the potential is specifically there with CD events that, that could make this really impactful in this coming year? Andre, I'm not gonna pick on you for a spin, if it's okay, let's pick with you and then Gerard and Andrea, you can fill in from there.

Uh, sure. Yeah. So for me, um, 2025 is gonna be a really good year.

'cause like I said, like, um, we started the implementation sig about, I don't know, maybe a month or two months ago. And so we're gonna start implementing the things that we're talking about, the, the specifications, the theory, you know, and try to prove that these concepts work, um, and ensure that they are of quality and, and are very efficient as well. So that's gonna be very key for us in 2025, is getting, um, the actual implementations down so companies can actually start using these technologies, or even people, you know, if they're interested in seeing how this stuff works and wanting to see, um, the efficiency and the, the eases ability of tra uh, just changing tools, you know, we wanna be able to provide that.

And then also on top of that, we also want to kind of, we, we talked a lot about interoperability, but there's also another side of the coin that CD events, um, really caters to, which, which I think we want to also cover here is, is metrics and, and telemetry. So that's another good job that we've done, um, at CD events spec wise is, is when you're looking at CD events from afar, um, there's this concept called links, which allows you to like link the individual events together. So if you're some sort of like, let's say you're very happy, you're sort of on the very top of the leaderboard or you know, in, in terms of like, just like CEO or CFO or something, you could actually look at the impact of, let's say, when a ticket was open to how long it took to actually get that feature out into production and all the bugs that were associated with it, just with CD events.

So that's, that's gonna be our overarching goal. Are we gonna get there in 2025? Uh, I could hope, but probably not.

But we're gonna try to strive there through the, through the implementation stakes by answering, you know, like what the spec looks like, as well as how do we address the observability portion of it. So that's gonna be the focus, well, at least my focus for the next year is the implementation of these concepts. Yeah, I think Dan to, to kind of, um, lean in on what Ben said and, you know, even potentially go further and broader, is the more enterprises, um, that kind of adopt CD events, I think, you know, from where what we have seen so far in our adoption is it's actually created new questions and new things we can ask of information that we didn't actually think and think of before.

'cause there was no visibility or transparency into the underlying data. So therefore we didn't realize there was even questions to be asked. So, you know, how do, how could we apply this in, in a governance compliance perspective?

Can we apply this in a security perspective? Can we in product, even if we wanted to try, you know, the, the million dollar question, does Gen AI deliver on its productivity? You know, are we now being able to look inside the data, right?

The data's the currency and the data's the evidence. And are we able to look inside this data, um, to, to gain understanding from it? I think, I think there's a lot of exploration yet that I think CD events has opened up to us.

Um, and we're looking actually forward to sit to innovating into that, exploring that, innovating within that space, and see what other opportunities outside of the ones we already know and that, you know, Andre and Ben have articulated that we're, that the community is focusing on building in 25. But I think I'm look also looking forward to 25 is what does the 26 roadmap look like? What does the 27 roadmap?

Because I think there's great potential and opportunity here. Yeah. I just wanna make note, we got about 22 to 23 minutes in before Gen AI was mentioned today.

That's pretty darn good. Pretty darn good. Um, but I agree with you, Gerard, Andrea, back to you.

Yeah. Um, thanks. And I totally agree with, um, Moger and, and Ben mentioned, and I mean from, uh, I look at it from, from a kind of, uh, open source project point of view and what we, we plan and what we, we hope to, to, to achieve in, in 2025.

And, um, we, we discussed about the, um, implementation working group and what we really want to focus on in, you know, to, to help enterprises company and open source project adopt CD events and make the most of it, you know, starting from small, uh, and, you know, to grow to, uh, a larger scale like, you know, covering the entire SDLC like Ben was saying, you know, asking new questions, building new, new metrics. And so, you know, we, we keep on like working, improving our SDKs, um, increasing more languages, um, uh, you know, drawing kind of reference architecture that companies can use to say, okay, this is how we we go about, uh, adopting city events. We need this component and that component and so forth.

And, uh, what, what characteristics do they need and so forth. And so this is, uh, uh, some of the areas where we are going to focus. And, and of course, I mean, I, I was talking about city events at the, the Linux Foundation Member Summit a couple of weeks ago, and I think it was a bit further than 20%, but maybe about 50, 60% from my slides.

I also had a mention of Gen AI because it must be there. Uh, and, and that's an area actually though that, um, where we, we might consider expanding the, uh, the specification as well, uh, because, um, we've been talking about building software and the software, uh, uh, lifecycle and, uh, software factory. Uh, but now something that, uh, a lot of companies are doing is building AI applications.

And so we want to make sure that we have all the, uh, events that are relevant for those kind of application as well as part of the specification. And I made a call to action during my, uh, my, my talk and there was quite good response already. Someone in that space said, oh yeah, but be interested, you know, in contributing events in that space.

So we hope to see that's that going. That would be great. It certainly would be great.

Um, how does CD events play with the other CDF projects? Right? This is something I've bought in the past too, right?

Because, you know, if you look at it, you look at the CDF projects, they all kinda live in their own silo, right? And there's not as much integration as one may think, but CD events seems to me to be something that would work with some of the other CD foundation projects, right? And there can be integrations there and there can be crossover, cross promotion, cross use, so forth.

Um, community building, is there someone from cd, you know, on the CD events side that is looking at that? Is that something the CDF board is looking at? You know, where do we get one plus one equals three maybe?

That's a great question, Alan. Thanks. Thanks for that.

So, um, indeed, one of the goals of city events is to, you know, be supported by as many communities as possible. And being at the CDF, the CDF project are our first, you know, and the closest project, our, the project. And, uh, we discussed this also as part of the technical oversight committee.

And, you know, uh, we think as a, as a TOC from a TOC point of view, that's definitely a priority to get c event support in all the CDF projects. Um, and that's, uh, already the case for many of the projects. Uh, I mean, thanks to the Fidelity, uh, contributed the, the Jenkins plugin.

So you can produce CD events, um, from, from Jenkins already. And we, there is support, uh, on Spinnaker that was contributed by, uh, apple and Ericsson. Uh, so we have experimental support in Tacton, and so many of the projects are already coming on board.

And we are also working on a, a mechanism that we call the, the web adapter to integrate more and more projects as a, as a kind of translation layer that we want to, to, um, we started implementing and with plugins that can decode, basically translate messages from, uh, different platforms into, into city events, you know, to speed up the, the adoption. Excellent. Um, guys, we're almost outta time.

You know what I realized? Did we mention a website specifically for the, I know we mentioned the CD Foundation website, but did we mention the website for the CD events project? We did not.

Where can we go get more CD events, project specific info CD events Dev, I think, right? Andrea? Yeah.

CD events Dev. Yeah, so city events do dev, and then from there we have documentation, we have the community page. We'll send you, like Ben was saying earlier, to where all the community meetings and details and how to contribute.

Um, and we have the city events organization and GitHub as well with all our specification as the case and, and more, You know, will there be a specific track for CD events at the DD Foundation Summit in June or too early to tell yet? And the CD con is kind of like a mini summit. I think it happens the day before.

Uh, right, the day, I think it might be day zero is it, or, um, of the conference. So as part of the call for papers, um, you know, we'll have multiple, multiple talks during that mini-conference. And yeah, absolutely hope we have, uh, CD events being one of those talks where we, you know, we can share more with them, with the audience that, that are right, that are around that day.

Excellent. Excellent. Do you know where in Denver the event is Event in the Colorado Convention Center?

That's what I was thinking. The Convention Center. It's a nice place, a nice place for this.

So do check that out. You can get to the Open Source Summit as part of the Linux Foundation, uh, website as well. It's Open Source Summit North America.

We're about outta time. Andrea, Andrea not thank you for being on here today, but also thank you for all you're doing around the CD events project, right? It's not easy, as I said before, kind of breathing life into these things day to day.

So thank you very much, and thanks for being on the show today. Gerard, thank you for joining us as well, and for all you do. You know, it's one thing for, and I don't mean to slide anyone, but when a vendor has people on board, generally the vendor's paying for them, but the vendor has an agenda, right?

Uh, yeah. Here, you know, Gerard, you represent the every man and woman, right? And as part of Fidelity, and Fidelity is a huge supporter of Open source as, as I think most of us know.

But, um, thank you for all you do on CD Foundation and, and, uh, volunteering your time. And then of course, Ben, thank you for what you're doing and staying on top of all this. It really does take a village to, to, you know, maintain these foundations.

So it's not just the Linux Foundation, you know, sprinkling some money and dust on these things. It's, it's the day-to-day work that, that keeps it going. So thank all three of you will we, we'll be back next month with another topic for our CD pipeline show.

Lori and d, we hope you feel better. We're sorry you missed it, but this Alan Shimel for techstrong and CD Pipeline. Have a great day.