DevOps Quiz!
Which was the first Continuous Integration Tool?
- Jenkins
- Hudson
- CruiseControl
- TeamCity
- Bamboo
Answer
CruiseControl came first! If you are interested in the backstory, read further!
In 2000, one of the founding members, Martin Fowler of the Agile Alliance, became an internal advocate for continuous integration at ThoughtWorks.
Fowler believed that Continuous Integration is a practice that requires no particular tooling to deploy. Over a period of time, the team at Thoughtworks felt that it is helpful to use a Continuous Integration server. This led to the birth of the open-source tool CruiseControl, which we can say the world’s first Continuous Integration tool built by the team at ThoughtWorks.
Soon, the market started crowded with a bunch of Continuous Integration tools, both open-source and commercial.
Hudson, another Java-based CI tool, was released in 2005, but it wasn’t until 2008 that it surpassed CruiseControl. But over the period, Hudson landed in trouble. Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the author of Hudson, worked for Sun Microsystems, which Oracle bought in 2010. Hudson, like CruiseControl, was free and open-source, so when Oracle revealed plans to trademark and commercialize it in 2011, the Hudson community departed under the new name Jenkins, which is still active today.
There are exciting backstories on other tools like TeamCity, Bamboo, etc. Maybe, we can cover that on some other day.
