CloudBees, the enterprise Jenkins company and continuous delivery leader, today announced the general availability of Jenkins Workflow, a significant new capability that helps establish Jenkins as the de facto continuous delivery (CD) hub for DevOps teams to build and automate software delivery pipelines. CloudBees worked with the Jenkins Community to define requirements for Workflow, contributed the bulk of the code and drove the release of the new Workflow functionality. After the community made Workflow available for developer preview earlier this year, today’s release makes Jenkins Workflow widely available for enterprises, addressing a long-standing community request to natively support pipelines in Jenkins.
The community collaboration and development investment by CloudBees to help make Jenkins Workflow available is a direct result of CloudBees’ new business strategy focusing exclusively on continuous delivery powered by Jenkins. The availability of Jenkins Workflow creates significant added value for enterprises, most of who are already using Jenkins for continuous integration. When combined with the existing 1,000 Jenkins plugins that enable integration with virtually any development and delivery tool, it establishes Jenkins as the hub of enterprise continuous delivery.
“Jenkins users have asked for native support of complex workflows for delivering software across the organization and the community has delivered it,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, chief technology officer at CloudBees, who is also the founder and a governance board member of the Jenkins CI open source project. “This offering builds on top of a number of earlier efforts in the community. It is jam-packed with amazing features.”
Previously, the only way to create pipelines in Jenkins was to string multiple jobs together. This was often cumbersome, error-prone and difficult to manage. Using Jenkins Workflow, users can now define workflow processes in a single place, avoiding the need to coordinate across multiple build jobs.
“As organizations move from continuous integration to continuous delivery, they’re looking for tools to help them increase productivity and decrease time to market. Workflow truly establishes Jenkins as the core resource, right in the middle of the continuous delivery process,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees. “I’m proud of our significant investment in this important project. We look forward to working with the community further to make Workflow the foundation for even more advanced continuous delivery functionality in the future.”