Continuous Delivery Foundation

The Linux Foundation’s home for CI/CD projects: launched in 2019 around Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton, it hosts six projects in 2026 after Tekton and Shipwright moved to the CNCF.

1 projects in this catalogPart of the Linux Foundation 1 graduated Website

What it is

The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) is part of the non-profit Linux Foundation. It was announced on March 12, 2019 to give the tools that build, test and ship software a vendor-neutral home, with four founding projects: Jenkins, the CI/CD automation server; Jenkins X, CI/CD for Kubernetes; Spinnaker, a multi-cloud continuous delivery platform; and Tekton, shared building blocks for CI/CD systems. Eight companies joined at the top Premier level (Capital One, CircleCI, CloudBees, Google, Huawei, IBM, JFrog and Netflix), and 15 more, including GitLab, Red Hat, SAP and Snyk, as General or End User members.

Seven years on, the foundation is smaller. In October 2026 it hosts six projects: Jenkins; JayeX, as Jenkins X has been called since April 2026; Spinnaker; Screwdriver, a build platform from Yahoo; Ortelius, which maps the packages in SBOMs to where they are deployed; and CDEvents, a specification for the events CI/CD tools send each other. Shipwright left for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2024 and Tekton followed in March 2026. Its members page lists 13 members: three Premier members, including Apple and CloudBees, six General members such as Harness, Octopus Deploy and Spacelift, Capital One and eBay as End User members, and two Associates. Google, IBM and Netflix are no longer among them.

For someone choosing a tool, the badge means the project’s name and assets sit with the Linux Foundation and its maturity has been voted on by the CDF’s Technical Oversight Committee (TOC). There is no sandbox: every project starts at Incubating, which already asks for two independent production users. Graduation asks for maintainers and committers from at least two organisations and an OpenSSF Best Practices badge, but no third-party security audit, which the CNCF requires. In October 2026 the foundation’s landscape lists Jenkins as its only Graduated project and the other five as Incubating.

Its projects in this catalog

Graduated1

Projects with a governing body drawn from at least two companies, committers from at least two organisations, documented governance and release processes and an OpenSSF Best Practices badge, approved by a two-thirds TOC vote.

JenkinsOpen sourceThe self-hosted automation server much of CI started on: a Java controller that hands jobs to agents, more than 2,300 plugins, and pipelines written as a Jenkinsfile.

In depth

Projects, past and present#

Project	What it is	At the CDF
Jenkins	Self-hosted automation server for CI/CD, extended by plugins	Founding project; the first to graduate, in August 2020
JayeX (formerly Jenkins X)	CI/CD for Kubernetes	Founding project; Incubating; renamed in April 2026
Spinnaker	Multi-cloud continuous delivery platform	Founding project; Incubating
Screwdriver	Build platform for continuous delivery, from Yahoo	Incubating
Ortelius	Maps SBOM packages to the applications and endpoints that run them	Incubating
CDEvents	A vocabulary of CI/CD events on top of CloudEvents	Incubating; first release, v0.1, in October 2022
Tekton	Kubernetes resources for building CI/CD systems	Founding project; graduated in October 2022; moved to the CNCF as Incubating in March 2026
Shipwright	Builds container images on Kubernetes	Joined in August 2021; moved to the CNCF Sandbox in 2024
Pyrsia	Decentralised package network for supply-chain security	Joined in October 2022; listed as a former project

Stages are those on the CDF landscape in October 2026. A 2023 conference talk and a CDF case-study page disagree on Spinnaker’s stage; the landscape lists it as Incubating.

Who decides#

The Governing Board represents the paying members. Project matters belong to the Technical Oversight Committee, which admits projects and moves them between stages with two-thirds votes. It has nine seats: four elected by the projects, two elected by end users and three chosen by the Governing Board, with two-year terms for most. Each project keeps its own maintainers and governance, and the TOC reviews every project’s stage once a year.

Work that spans projects happens in special interest groups. CDEvents, which extends CloudEvents with a vocabulary for CI/CD, is the closest the foundation has come to the “industry-wide specification” Kohsuke Kawaguchi hoped for at the launch. In October 2026 the foundation started two new groups, on AI and on platform engineering.

Where it came from2019–2026

The Linux Foundation announced the CDF on March 12, 2019 with four projects that until then had been run separately: Jenkins, which dates back to 2004; Jenkins X; Spinnaker; and Tekton, which Google engineers had split out of Knative only weeks earlier so that Kubernetes CI systems would stop rebuilding the same basic pieces. Chris Aniszczyk of the Linux Foundation said the CDF would “establish a community of projects to advance industry best practices and innovation around CI/CD”, and Jenkins creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi hoped to “create an industry-wide specification”.

Jenkins became its first graduated project in August 2020. In October 2022 Tekton graduated, Pyrsia joined and CDEvents published its first release. After that the foundation began to lose projects to the CNCF, home of Kubernetes: Shipwright moved in 2024, saying Kubernetes was central to it, and Tekton was accepted as a CNCF incubating project in March 2026. In April 2026 Jenkins X renamed itself JayeX, because the old name drew people looking for Jenkins.

Why it’s built this way

Start every project at Incubating: There is no sandbox for experiments. A project needs two TOC sponsors and two independent production users to get in, so the foundation hosts tools that are already in use.
Interoperability through a shared specification: CI/CD pipelines chain many tools. Rather than pick one, the foundation backed CDEvents, a common event vocabulary on top of CloudEvents, so tools from different vendors can react to each other.
TOC seats for projects, end users and the board: The nine seats are split between people elected by the projects, people elected by end users and Governing Board appointees, so neither maintainers nor paying members alone decide which projects get in or move up.

Timeline

2019
Announced on March 12 with Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton
2020
Jenkins becomes the first graduated project in August
2021
Shipwright joins in August
2022
Tekton graduates; Pyrsia joins; CDEvents v0.1 in October
2024
Shipwright moves to the CNCF Sandbox
2026
Tekton moves to the CNCF in March; Jenkins X renamed JayeX in April; AI and platform engineering SIGs in October

Sources · facts checked 2026-10-28

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