CloudEvents Plugin for Jenkins: Interoperability between Jenkins and other CI/CD Tools

With workloads and teams becoming more diverse and complex, there is an increasing need to automate various tasks in the CI/CD ecosystem of an application as a way to decrease complexity that can come with CI/CD.

A more diverse team working across different aspects of the application requires a diverse suite of CI/CD tools too, to test and deliver to a wide range of users. More often than not, we need these tools to work together and exchange data to form an effective CI/CD pipeline. However, chaining multiple services together can very easily increase complexity.

How? Each of these services use a different "language" to communicate and represent the entity(an event) which occured inside that service. In order for another service to understand this "language", the service might need to develop customized clients and agents which specialize in understanding, traversing and taking-actions based on what was transmitted to it by the first service.

One can think of it as a translator who specializes in a language called ABC, and each service who wants to communicate with the service who uses ABC will have to employ this translator, or perhaps get another trained translator. And there is no guarantee that this translator will also help communicate with other services speaking a completely different language.

We can see how easily that can grow in cost and maintenance. A preferred way is to have a common language each of these services use and understand as a way to communicate amongst each other. This way, an event which is emitted using this common language will be available to any of the interested receiver without that receiver needing a special agent. This way of communication which uses a common/standard language also creates a way for agnostic communication where the sender or the receiver are sending and receiving data without creating a tight coupling between the two.

CloudEvents specification is enabling that loosely-coupled, event-driven communication between services by enforcing a common language which defines how an event should be emitted and transferred between systems.