Zuul 5.0 release advances high availability, scalability and ease of use of popular open source project gating software

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Zuul, a project supported by the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation), uses project gating to automate continuous integration, delivery and deployment of interrelated software projects in a secure manner. Built for a world where development, testing and deployment of applications and their dependencies are one continuous process, Zuul delivers sophisticated project gating, especially in scenarios involving multiple repositories with integrated deliverables. 

The Zuul community today announced the release of version 5.0 of its open source continuous integration (CI) project gating software designed to help developers stop merging broken code. You can learn about Zuul and download version 5.0.

Zuul 5.0 delivers the following enhancements:

  • Every component is scalable and highly-available
  • Augmented Web UI for administrators
  • New and improved drivers
  • Focus on running in containers

“Zuul enables teams to rapidly develop fully tested software in parallel, and version 5 helps us achieve this at a massive scale,” said James Blair, Zuul maintainer and founder of Acme Gating. “Zuul users can benefit from zero-downtime operation and the knowledge that Zuul can support project gating across the entire enterprise.

Key Features in More Detail

In Zuul 5.0, every component is stateless, scalable and highly available. This allows users to support more tenants, projects and changes in a single instance and enjoy zero-downtime migrations and upgrades.

Web UI for administrators: In Zuul 5.0, authentication support has been added to the web UI, which allows administrators to:

  • Dequeue changes
  • Promote changes
  • Re-enqueue changes
  • Autohold nodes

In addition, Zuul 5.0 integrates with any OpenID Connect provider.

New and Improved Drivers: Zuul 5.0 includes a highly scalable Azure cloud driver, and the GitHub and Gitlab drivers saw significant improvements and new features. Also added is Zuul’s first cloud driver that operates on a meta level. Called Metastatic, this new driver will talk to any or all of Zuul’s single-cloud drivers to allocate nodes upon which it provisions workloads. Metastatic now allows load-sharing of large cloud nodes.

Focus on running in containers: The upstream Zuul project now creates production-ready container builds. The Zuul project—which uses Zuul deployed from these images for testing all of its own changes—recommends these container images for new deployments. Plus, the Zuul-operator project saw significant updates, bringing it to functional parity with Zuul. In addition, initial Prometheus support was added to all Zuul components, along with liveness and readiness probes for ease of use in running in Kubernetes.

For more information about the features of Zuul 5.0, view the release notes

“With this 5.0 release, Zuul really gets to the next level in terms of solving enterprise needs,” said Thierry Carrez, general manager at the OpenInfra Foundation. “Fully horizontal scalability and zero-downtime upgrades enable even the most demanding use cases. The new admin web UI simplifies administrative tasks, and improved drivers allow for using Zuul for gating development wherever it happens. With the advancements made in this release, the Zuul community is continuing its decade-long history of innovation that has made Zuul the solid, production workhorse it is now.”

Zuul Users & Contributors

Originally announced on May 22, 2012, Zuul became a pilot project of the OpenStack Foundation (now the OpenInfra Foundation) in May 2018 and was confirmed as an OpenInfra Project on April 28, 2019. 

Zuul boasts a robust contributor base and user community, including Acme Gating, Ampere, the Ansible community, BMW, Cesnet, City Network, Cloudbase solutions, FiberHome, GoDaddy, GoodMoney, Inspur, Just Eat, Leboncoin, Nokia, OpenLab, OpenStack, OVHcloud, Red Hat, SUSE, Troila, Tungsten Fabric, VEXXHOST, Volvo, Wazo Platform, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Numerous case studies have been published highlighting how organizations like BMW, GoDaddy, Software Factory, Packet Host, Leboncoin, and even the OpenInfra Foundation run Zuul. The 2021 OpenInfra Foundation User Survey indicated 69% of respondents are running Zuul in production, 17% are evaluating Zuul and 14% are considering using Zuul.

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Allison Price