Cloudbees, Chef and Puppet Labs partner to improve DevOps traceability

As the traditional cycle of periodic applications upgrades fades into continuous delivery of fresh code as part of the changes cloud computing brings, the need to be able to track all aspects of all applications development processes becomes more important.

So for developers working in a continuous development environment, tools that provide continuous tracking of all development artifacts are now becoming a core part of the toolset they require. To help provide this, cloud development platform provider, CloudBees has partnered with Chef Software and Puppet Labs to provide continuous delivery traceability tools for all developers working with the Jenkins applications integration environment.

Both Chef Software and Puppet Labs are known for their open source IT automation platforms. This new integration gives DevOps and operations personnel the ability to use Jenkins for the first time to trace application code changes from development through deployment, and into production.

“The goal of making small frequent changes, and testing at every step, reduces the risk that exists every time new code is deployed to production. The integration with Jenkins and the CloudBees solutions gives developers greater visibility so they can deliver on the promise of continuous delivery.”

The announcement brings together the continuous integration server, Jenkins CI, with the infrastructure orchestration platforms from Chef and Puppet to provide the highest levels of traceability available. The integration solves one of the chief challenges DevOps teams face in the changing world of software development.

Previously, Jenkins tracked program files and packages that flow through it via a mechanism called `fingerprinting’. However, when these files move outside of Jenkins, as is the case when Chef or Puppet deploys them, Jenkins can no longer track them.

The new integration, developed by CloudBees and in collaboration with development teams from both Chef and Puppet, fills this gap and provides DevOps teams with complete traceability.

DevOps personnel can now rely on Jenkins to trace not only which version of a change is running and where it is running, but also when it was deployed and what tests were run against it. All of this can occur even in complex and asynchronous environments. This added traceability allows further process automation within Jenkins and extends continuous delivery even further than before.

“A need for automation has been driving our industry and traceability is a key enabler of automation,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, chief technology officer, CloudBees, and founder of the Jenkins CI community. “The trend to automate is accelerating even further as people adopt continuous delivery methodologies. This latest integration from CloudBees is another step forward in support of automation and continuous delivery adoption.”

To provide this additional layer of visibility, CloudBees is making available a new development notification plug-iin for both open source Jenkins CI and the CloudBees continuous delivery platform. This functionality is available no matter where enterprise teams are working - on-premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid environment.

“Giving users of both Jenkins and Chef Software this added capability will help them do a better job developing applications and making updates to them quickly, efficiently and error-free,” said Adam Jacob, chief technology officer and co-founder, Chef Software. “Jenkins already has proven to be an indispensable resource for the DevOps community – and this move by CloudBees to provide complete traceability and visibility of artifacts throughout the complete delivery process just raises the bar another notch.”

According to Mitch Stonies, vice president, corporate and business development, Puppet Labs, continuous delivery offers real value to both the business and technical teams within an enterprise. Here, the goal of making small frequent changes, and testing at every step, reduces the risk that exists every time new code is deployed to production.

“The integration with Jenkins and the CloudBees solutions gives developers greater visibility so they can deliver on the promise of continuous delivery,” he said.