Preface A LETTER FROM THE CREATOR OF JENKINS When I wrote the first line of a shell script that would eventually become Jenkins, one of the motivations was to make myself and other developers in the team more pro- ductive. Software development in my team was still held together in good part by lots of manual work, emails, meetings and phone calls. I felt like a bit of automation would go a long way in reducing those, so that we could all spend more time doing things that actually matter, such as designing, collaborating and writing more code. That shell script is long gone, but it turns out the idea lived longer than any of the code written for Jenkins, and got bigger than myself. It transcended beyond me to the Jenkins community of thousands of contributors and mil- lions of users. It took me time to understand what was really going on, but it turns out there were a lot of people like me everywhere in the world. Under the umbrella of the Jenkins project, we were able to join hands - devel- oper to developer - to collectively create this open source ecosystem that enabled us to build amazing applications faster. And it’s this same idea that carries through to Jenkins X, the newest addition to the Jenkins family. Jenkins X takes a bold and exciting approach to this idea. It takes all the “awesome” (which is one of the James Strachan-isms I picked up) things happening in the world of microservices and cloud native application development and assembles those into a simple form that makes sense for everyone. vii