Sol Duara, a provider of open source platforms for managing the software development lifecycle (SDLC), has announced its intent to contribute an open source orchestration platform for automating software development workflows to the Continuous Delivery (CD) Foundation.
At the core of the Conduit platform from Sol Duara is CDrus Expressions, a framework that turns CDEvents vocabulary into expressed intent. Sol Duara has also built an internal developer platform (IDP) based on CDrus Expressions and Tekton pipelines that adheres to a set of principles through which established systems theory, software architecture patterns, and interoperability frameworks are unified to advance interoperability across continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms.
Sol Duara CEO Dadisi Sanyika, who also is the chair of the CD Foundation, said contributing Conduit to the CD Foundation is intended to encourage more providers of DevOps tools and platforms to support CDEvents, a specification that is being advanced by the CD Foundation to encourage interoperability across the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Currently an incubation level project within the CD Foundation, CDEvents defines a common events language that decouples pipeline descriptions from physical implementations, improving both scalability and overall resiliency. Additionally, standardized events make it simpler to improve observability and auditability of workflows spanning multiple DevOps tools and platforms.
It is still early days so far as adoption of CDEvents is concerned, but as more DevOps teams look to unify the management of diverse tools and platforms, the need for greater interoperability between tools and platforms is becoming a much larger concern. Few organizations are in a position to standardize on a single platform, so what is needed is a way to reduce the level of friction that currently exists between tools and platforms that today don’t easily interoperate.
Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for software lifecycle engineering at the Futurum Group, said CDEvents is emerging as the event substrate for SDLC interoperability. It provides an open vocabulary an AI agent, for example, can read and act on without the need for a specific bespoke integration, he added.
The weight of all the bespoke integrations that DevOps teams need to create and maintain ultimately locks them into specific tools and platforms. An open source workflow orchestration platform based on CDEvents, in contrast, makes it easier to swap out tools and platforms as needed. That capability may be especially critical in an artificial intelligence (AI) era where agents will be invoking multiple tools and platforms at machine speed.
In the meantime, DevOps and, especially platform engineering teams, that are looking to consolidate tools and platforms might see CDEvents as a means to a larger end. After all, it’s unlikely that any legacy tool or platform is likely to be ripped and replaced overnight. However, if every tool and platform is generating events in a way that is simpler to consistently consume, it suddenly becomes a lot easier over time to mix and match tools and platforms as circumstances and preferences may warrant.