AWS is doubling down on improving the open source continuous delivery experience for our customers

We are thrilled to announce that AWS is joining the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) as a Premier member. Continuous delivery is the bridge between software that our customers build and cloud services that AWS offers, and CDF is the interface to the community that is driving many important innovations in this space.

We join the CDF to further support development of open source tools and services designed to enable companies in a broad range of industries to build and deliver products using continuous delivery and DevOps. As part of membership, Peder Ulander, Director, AWS Solutions Marketing, will join CDF’s Governing Board. Harry Mower, Director, AWS Code Suite, and his team will also closely collaborate with the CDF board and technical community. In addition to the CDF membership, Paul Roberts, Principal Solutions Architect, Strategic Accounts, has joined the Spinnaker steering committee. Spinnaker is a cloud-based continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes rapidly and reliably and is also a CDF Founding Project.

Efficient DevOps practices are core to a successful cloud strategy for AWS customers and partners, such as Netflix, Autodesk, Salesforce, and Airbnb, among others. Providing flexible tools and workflows that increase their ability to deliver applications and services more securely and at a faster pace has been the forefront of our efforts at AWS, which is why AWS has invested years in building AWS Managed Services for software rollout, such as AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy. It is also why we actively contribute to open source continuous integration and continuous delivery projects that our customers build or use.

One such open source project that keeps increasing in importance for our customers is Spinnaker. Spinnaker makes rolling out software without having to worry about the underlying cloud infrastructure easier for developers. We have been contributing to Spinnaker since 2018, and we have written about some of our contributions in the past. Contributions include enabling regional support in Spinnaker, building integrations with AWS Lambda, and delivering support for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS).

We are taking our Spinnaker contributions farther and are teaming up with Netflix to help build the next generation of Spinnaker. We recently have discussed helping Netflix support Kubernetes in managed delivery, the new GitOps-centric feature of Spinnaker. This new feature set is an exciting collaboration with the open source community, as Spinnaker experienced a surge in activity in 2020, with an average of 3,587 GitHub events weekly—302% growth over average weekly events in 2018 and 2019. We believe that this momentum will continue to grow as we invest with our friends and partners on further improving support for GitOps in Spinnaker.

We are already receiving supportive messages from our customers and partners on AWS joining CDF and appointing a Spinnaker steering committee member.

“AWS joining the CDF is a real milestone in the growth of the community and shows how important Spinnaker has become in continuous delivery. Spinnaker has thrived under the CDF umbrella. We believe that open governance and a broader community reach worldwide through the CDF has laid the foundation for growth and participation for critical players like AWS,” said Eric Chiang, Engineering Manager at Netflix and CD Foundation Board Member. “This is exciting news. Welcome, AWS!”

“Welcome to CDF. AWS will provide leadership and continued technical contributions that will strongly benefit the Spinnaker community as well as the larger continuous delivery ecosystem worldwide. It is critical that key tools and components are open source and are governed and developed in a vendor-neutral arena,” said Tracy Miranda, Continuous Delivery Foundation Executive Director. “AWS joining the CDF shows that the path forward for open source development of continuous delivery tools and services is brighter than ever.”

In addition to Spinnaker, AWS has been involved with a number of other CDF Founding Projects. We previously wrote about using Tekton for deploying Lambda functions, using Jenkins-X with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), how Jenkins is an effective build and integration tool for our developers, and how to create Jenkins pipelines for serverless applications with AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) CLI. Going forward, we plan to continue to increase our engagements with these open source communities and work toward the betterment of CI/CD technology for the community and our customers.