CI/CD process has been something your DevOps engineer purpose-built for your team. But with Kubernetes & cloud-native, that’s becoming “legacy.” The rising level of platform abstraction allows all the good practices that the industry has developed over time to be integrated, hidden, and simplified behind just one practice called “GitOps.” That simplified world is what Jenkins X enables. We will discuss GitOps, Jenkins X, and how that combination drastically simplifies cloud-native web app development. You’ll understand why traditional DevOps is not suitable in a Kubernetes and cloud-native world, explore GitOps principles and discover how they facilitate high-velocity app development. And finally, Kohsuke will make a fool of himself by talking about the future — now that Jenkins X simplifies the CD process, where is the next frontier?

1. GitOps, Jenkins X &
Future of CI/CD
Kohsuke Kawaguchi | Co-CEO, Launchable, Inc.
kkawaguchi@launchableinc.com | @kohsukekawa

2. DORA
State of
DevOps
Reports

3. “software delivery is an exercise in
continuous improvement, and our research
shows that year over year the best keep
getting better, and those who fail to improve
fall further and further behind.”
- Nicole Forsgren

4. Building and scaling high performance
technology organisations

5. • Common platform in all clouds
• AWS, Azure, GCP
• OpenShift, CloudFoundry
• Functionalities
• Cluster scheduler
• Service discovery
• Load balancer
• Extensibility
New “Cloud Operating System” is here

7. DevOps is the new legacy

8. So what is
important?

9. GitOps

10. What?
Source: https://www.weave.works/blog/what-is-gitops-really

11. Why?
• Transparency without sacrificing auditability &
access control
• How/who to get changes in
• What has happened
• Tools agnostic – works with any ”Infrastructure
as Code,” not just K8s

12. Why?
• Promote higher abstraction and reuse
• Review/test before you merge
• Trivial roll back, change detection, etc through
familiar workflows of Git/GitHub

13. You can have fun tinkering…

14. Or you can just get productive

15. Jenkins X vision
• Figure out the best practice of how to CD cloud
native apps
• Not just build, test, but reviewing, promotion,
changelog, collaboration, etc.
• Integrate best of the bleed software in this
ecosystem to achieve it
• Democratize it by building a pleasant CLI that
represents high-level steps
• Be opinionated on how to do things
• Kubernetes is a means to the end

16. Image: https://flic.kr/p/smze69

17. Development Flow We Preach

18. More Best practice we preach
• Use cloud to develop, keep your laptop for what
it needs to do
• Keep master always releasable
• Deploy often and in small increments
• Inform other people about where changes are

19. Best Practices That Are
“Boring”

20. Integrate best of the bleed software in
this ecosystem to achieve it

21. MultiCloud Support: jx create cluster

22. • brew tap jenkins-x/jx
• brew install jx
• jx create cluster
Let’s get going

23. • You got all that tools, preconfigured properly
• Jenkins, with elastic build agents to build
containers
• Artifact repository to speed up your builds
• Monocular to catalog Helm charts
• You got staging & production environments
• For all your future apps to be onboarded to
Jenkins X
What just happened?

24. • Create a new project
• jx create spring
• Make your existing app work in Jenkins X
• jx import
Prepare your app

25. • Source code
• Wiring for build, deploy, & CD
• Jenkinsfile, Dockerfile, helm chart, …
• All services configured for you
• Repo on GitHub, webhook to Jenkins, Jenkins
jobs
• Initial release & all running in staging
What just happened?

26. • Work locally on a change
• Create a PR on GitHub
• Have the change reviewed & merged
Let’s work on a change

27. • Your PR gets automatically built & tested
• App deployed to a PR specific ‘preview
environment’
• Allows stakeholders to interact with the app
• Click a link in PR to see it
• (Then you merge your change)
• New master gets automatically built & tested
• New release gets created with changelog
What just happened?

28. • jx promote --version v0.0.3 --env production
• Go to GitHub and merge ‘deployment’ PR
• (v0.0.3 appears in production)
Let’s promote a release to production

29. Future of CI/CD

30. • Defend stability through depth, not just tests
GitOps is necessary, but
not sufficient for higher velocity

31. • Feature Flags
• Circuit Breaker
• Canary Deployment
• Better Observability
How do you defend in depth?

32. Leverage Production
Traffic
• Because there’s nothing like
production
• Traffic mirroring
• A/B testing

34. • Situation
• You are the DevOps team of a BigCo
• Massive modularized codebase with web
of dependencies
• Big, time consuming tests around them
• Questions
• I want to cut cost & time of the software
delivery process
Smarter testing

35. Step 1: Dependency Analysis

36. • ML model predicts useful subset to run
• Based on information about changes
• Of 105 changes/mo, 1% is used to train the
model
• Impact
• Only a third of tests are selected
• Misses just 0.1% of broken changes
• AWS cost is cut by half
36
Step 2: Predictive Test Selection

37. • Situation
• You are the SRE team in a BigCo
• You oversee 100s of apps
• ~1 deployment/app/day
• Questions
• Can we flag risky deployments
beforehand?
37
Deployment Risk Prediction

38. • Train model
• With 40,000 deployments of which 100
are failures
• Attributes: app names, commit messages,
…
• Impact
• Predict 99% of failures
• 5% false alarm rate
38
What they have done

39. • Learning
• Most outages are estimated as “low risk”
by developers
• Most outages had short time span till
approval
• Long-maintained code is more risky
• Imagine what you can do with this!
• Require somebody be on call
• Restrict window of deployment
39
What they have done

40. Where This Takes Us

41. • Every organization is trying to get better at
software delivery
• Kubernetes is an enabling technology but it can
be a detractor
• What’s important is DX, which is GitOps
• Jenkins X brings that for K8s without you rolling
your own which becomes legacy
• CI/CD is continuously evolving, so is Jenkins
Wrap Up

42. Thank You!