CloudBees readies Jenkins X SaaS platform

Jenkins X, a cloud-native version of the Jenkins CI/CD system for cloud applications on Kubernetes, will be offered via SaaS by CloudBees by 2020.

Using the Tekton framework as a pipeline-execution engine, Jenkins X provides pipeline automation, gitops (which combines the Git software version control system with Kubernetes), and preview environments for team collaboration.

The SaaS service follows CloudBees’s own commercial distribution of the open source Jenkins X; the CloudBees distribution includes commercial technical support and monthly updates, supports Google Kubernetes Engine and preview environments, and is planned to support Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and DevPods.

Separately, the base Jenkins platform, now 15 years old and orginally called Hudson when created by Sun Microsystems, may gain improvements around scalability, administration, and ease of use, said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the founder of Jenkins and chief scientist at CloudBees.