CloudBees has put Jenkins X to the fore in a raft of announcements at Kubecon this week, less than a year after the cloud native CI/CD project first saw the light of day.

CloudBees’s business is built around the open source Jenkins CI/CD platform. Jenkins X was announced in March – it takes the core Jenkins engine and adds an explicit tilt towards the cloud native world, with a focus on Kubernetes and other open source tools, as well as GitOps .

CloudBees used this week’s KubeCon gathering in Seattle to announce commercial support for Jenkins X – the essential security blanket that most enterprises need before throwing in their lot with the platform.

CloudBees’ offering will include 24×7 technical support for Jenkins X, and access to itscertified engineers. It will also offer an assisted upgrade programme to help development/ops teams make the jump.

CloudBees also used Kubecon to unveil its CloudBees Core for Kubernetes Continuous Delivery, which it described as a “continuous delivery solution that organizations can use to rapidly create, deploy and manage cloud native applications for Kubernetes.”

According to Cloudbees, developers get “the ability to quickly establish continuous delivery best practices by providing an opinionated workflow that leverages GitOps with environments managed as code”. They also get integrations to a “curated” set of CNCF projects. The idea of a “curated” set of projects has been touted before by CloudBees. Yes, there are plenty of tools and projects out there, but how do you know which are even being maintained, never mind actually do the job you need.

The latest flavour of CloudBees Core is the only commercial offering built on Jenkins X, the firm declared, and will allow teams to fully exploit Kubernetes and GitOps, “without having to learn the intricacies of Kubernetes”. This is a common theme across the Kubernetes world, with everyone seemingly agreeing that yes, Kubernetes is a container orchestrator wonder, but that it is also fiendishly tricky to actually use.

CloudBees also announced that its Core for Pivotal Cloud Foundry is now available for download on Pivotal’s Services Marketplace.

Talking of Pivotal…CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey predicted that it was “the next attractive target” for a cash rich outfit wanting to buy into the cloud native/open source worlds after the recent Red Hat and GitHub buys. He cited Google as the most likely predator, after it failed to snare Red Hat of GitHub. If Pivotal is not bought over the next two years, Labourey predicted it would be borged back into VMWare, or at a stretch, “maybe all of VMware and Pivotal will make it into a single Dell mothership!”