Building a Global Continuous Delivery Practice

In the last few years, CloudBees has witnessed first-hand the evolution and adoption of DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CD) in organizations. 

Originally, most of our discussions were “Jenkins” discussions. Teams within organizations had made the decision to use Jenkins as their de facto tool for Continuous Integration (CI) and/or CD. As Jenkins became their unique gateway to production (i.e., anything that lands in production must travel through a Jenkins pipeline to get there), Jenkins became as critical as the production itself for them. If you can’t upgrade or fix anything into production, you have a big (production) problem!

To make those teams successful, we provided a number of extensions on top of Jenkins (such as role-based access control and other features). This is an extraordinarily successful CloudBees offering that helps hundreds of teams and thousands of users around the globe operate a rock-solid Jenkins cluster.

In the last few years, however, the tone of these discussions has changed. We are now meeting with a lot of enterprises that are looking at building a formal Continuous Delivery “practice” in their organization. They want to standardize the way Continuous Delivery happens across the board. They want to be able to compare the productivity and velocity of all of their teams. For them, gone are the days of team-specific continuous delivery solutions. They have learned a lot through what leading-edge teams have done, they have set up proof of concepts, and they are now ready to leverage their critical mass to formalize — at scale — the best practices that fit their business.

What they are looking for is a single, unified Continuous Delivery solution that gives them visibility into all of their teams and applications. This, in turn, requires a platform that knows how to integrate with legacy, traditional, and leading edge environments, from AIX to Docker on AWS — not one different CD solution per project or technology of the day!

If speed and agility matter for individual applications, it certainly matters to the IT organization itself! As such, they can’t afford to have a one month lag time anytime they onboard a new team. They can’t even afford one day. They want to onboard new teams or new projects in a snap and give them a best of breed environment to build those delivery pipelines. Also, they want a platform that’s cost efficient. Efficient, both in terms of how it manages the underlying infrastructure at scale, and also in how much (or, rather little) work is involved in managing the platform itself. 

Consequently, in order to fulfill that need, CloudBees has launched CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise, the first and only platform that enables Continuous Delivery at scale for enterprises, based on the de facto DevOps hub, Jenkins. 

CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise is a full-fledged platform that can be deployed anywhere (Linux, VMware, OpenStack, and AWS, to name a few). It takes ownership of the provided infrastructure and provides a fully-managed continuous environment built on Jenkins. Based on Docker containers, CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise provides a self-service, elastic CD environment that can be centrally managed. It also enables enterprises to set up global policies and best practices that can be enforced among all teams across the organization.

Furthermore, the platform automatically handles backup and restore, automatically detects faulty behaviors, and properly recovers from those situations. This leads to a Continuous Delivery platform with a very low cost of maintenance and an excellent usage of the infrastructure through high-density Jenkins deployments that can readily scale up to thousands of teams, and tens of thousands of projects and users.