Continuous Delivery must be real, because it now has a foundation to put standards in place and oversee open source projects, kicking off with Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton.

A group of suppliers and major customers announced the formation of the Continuous Delivery Foundation today, with 22 founding members, including Jenkins backers CloudBees, and Tekton originator Google as Premier members.

Other Premier members include Capital One, Netflix and Huawei, while “general or end user” members include Red Hat, Sumo Logic, GitLab and HSBC.

In a statement, the Linux Foundation’s vice president of developer relations, Chris Aniszczyk, said, “As the market has shifted to containerized and cloud native technologies, the ecosystem of CI/CD systems, DevOps and related tools has radically changed. The number of available tools has increased, and there’s no defining industry specifications around pipelines and other CI/CD tools.”

The foundation said it hoped its genesis would mean “the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors can evangelize CI/CD as methodologies, define/document best practices, and create training materials to enable any software development team around the world to deliver code changes faster and more reliably, whether they are cloud native or not.”

Now that the foundation has gone live, the members will get down to the fulfilling work of putting governance structures in place, and forming a governing board, as well as technical, outreach and marketing committees.

There are plenty of organisations with CI/CD related services that are not on the list, such as (Microsoft) Azure and Atlassian – and that’s just the As.

The Linux Foundation also oversees the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, amongst others.

Having the Linux Foundation overseeing a CI/CD organisations and CNCF might raise some eyebrows . But the FAQ by the CD Foundation said, “The first thing to note is that CD is applicable across the entire software industry and just not modern cloud native applications” and the CNCF believed that  “most CD-related tooling is out of scope and broader than their focused cloud native definition”.