# Technology is a Product of Its Time
I am Grant, co-founder of KodeRover. Since returning to China to start my business in 2018, my team and I have built Zadig from scratch into the most beloved cloud-native DevOps platform for domestic developers, attracting thousands of enterprises to switch from Jenkins to the Zadig platform. I have always believed that technology reflects the development of its era, a belief rooted in my more than 20 years of work experience and observations in Silicon Valley.
In 2001, I graduated from Stanford University and was fortunate to join Google, which was small but rapidly developing at that time. There, I developed a strong interest in software technology entrepreneurship. In 2006, I joined a search advertising startup founded by former Google engineers, which was acquired for $60 million after just 9 months. Subsequently, I participated in the e-commerce venture of the global fitness brand TRX and witnessed the rise of Amazon's e-commerce and the formation of the cloud service market.
Later, my three Stanford alumni and I established a video transmission technology company in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley. Our business grew rapidly, reaching 25 million monthly active users, with neighbors like Facebook, Tesla, and Paypal. During those vibrant years, we witnessed the transformation of applications from traditional platforms to mobile and cloud computing.
This rich experience gave me a profound understanding of the relationship between technology and its era, and it also strengthened our determination to found KodeRover and promote the development of Zadig, dedicated to helping enterprises achieve more efficient and reliable software development and delivery in the cloud era.
With the eastward shift of the global economic center, I chose to return to China in 2018 and co-founded KodeRover with my partner Landy Li, a software engineering expert, committed to building a respected basic software enterprise originating from China. In this article, I will share my insights on technological innovation and the development of the times through a comparison of Zadig and the traditional tool Jenkins, hoping to provide valuable thoughts for industry development.
# Jenkins' Inventor Leaves the Jenkins Project
In 2004, 27-year-old Japanese engineer Kohsuke Kawaguchi (KK) came to Silicon Valley from Tokyo and joined Sun Microsystems. Due to his obsession with system code, he was often jokingly referred to by colleagues as "the last one to touch that code" in the build process, and frequently took the blame for it.
He decided to develop a tool that everyone could build easily: this became Jenkins. Jenkins clearly guessed what developers wanted, and thus became the most popular build tool globally over the past 20 years. However, with the rise of cloud-native technologies, it began to struggle, increasingly unable to anticipate what today's developers need, and the developer experience with Jenkins became increasingly poor! In 2018, KK acknowledged that Jenkins had a host of problems, such as service instability, a fragile configuration system with thousands of plugins, inability to plug and play, declining development speed, inefficient test quality, and process data that could not be analyzed in an engineered way. Eventually, KK left the Jenkins project and its parent company in 2020.
# Jenkins Expert Abandons Jenkins
In 2017, 27-year-old software engineer Landy Li was in charge of the engineering team at Qiniu Cloud, which included the development and maintenance of Jenkins ecosystem tools. That same year, Landy was invited to share her experience as a Jenkins expert at China's first Jenkins MeetUp. However, the reality was that facing scenarios of thousand-person R&D collaboration and high-frequency delivery, she realized that managing software delivery with Jenkins had major limitations: inefficiency, low quality, frequent incidents, and difficult maintenance became increasingly prominent in the critical cloud computing service scenarios.
Meanwhile, Kubernetes was gradually emerging as the de facto standard for next-generation operating systems, demonstrating powerful "cloud-native" capabilities for declarative resource scheduling, bringing feasibility to the quality engineering of the entire software delivery process. It was at that critical age of 27 that Landy began to develop a new delivery tool based on containerization, which was promoted and tested internally at Qiniu Cloud. The project was code-named Spock, and later, after being rearchitected based on Kubernetes, began its entrepreneurial journey to become today's Zadig.
# Jenkins Isn't Wrong, It's Just Old
Jenkins has been an important tool in the software development field for the past twenty years, focusing on improving build efficiency and relying on plugins to implement release processes. However, over time, Jenkins has gradually exposed some problems, such as insufficient service stability, configuration difficulties due to complex plugin systems, steep learning curve, limited development efficiency, and inefficient testing processes. These issues have made Jenkins struggle in the cloud-native era, unable to meet modern enterprises' high-efficiency requirements for collaborative delivery.
Meanwhile, Zadig, as an emerging cloud-native DevOps platform, has gained attention for its efficiency and quality improvements across the entire software delivery process. Zadig has clear advantages in environment management, user experience, quality assurance, plug-and-play, and development speed. It simplifies the development process, allowing engineers to focus on core development work rather than being bogged down by tedious configuration and management tasks.
As Derrick, the CEO of the new retail industry leader Freemud, said: "Zadig helps us liberate productivity, potentially improving efficiency not by several times, but by more than ten times. It brings not just results, but also the improvement of personnel capabilities, which is the most important thing."
In conclusion, while Jenkins played an important role in the past, it can no longer meet current needs in the rapidly developing cloud-native era. Zadig, with its modern design and functionality, has become the ideal choice for driving enterprise digital transformation and improving R&D efficiency.
# Zadig Surpasses Jenkins, Moving with the Times
Since its independent launch and open-source release more than two years ago, Zadig has risen rapidly, becoming the first choice for thousands of domestic enterprises and winning the favor of a large number of developers. I have summarized the main reasons why people are fond of Zadig:
Excellent Developer Experience and Team Efficiency Improvement: Zadig deeply integrates with team workflows, achieving efficient collaboration, quality output, and low-cost operations. By handling complexity through the platform, Zadig improves organizational work efficiency, breaks down information silos, and promotes the building of growth-oriented organizations.
Integrated Engineering Capabilities: Zadig provides full-process R&D support, including efficient building, environment management, and high-quality releases. It supports parallel deployment of multiple services, cloud-native build and runtime environments, seamless integration with infrastructure, and enterprise-level SSO/permission management, etc. In comparison, Jenkins is weaker in these aspects, with security risks, unsatisfactory operational efficiency, and maintenance costs.
Enterprise-Level Solutions: Zadig provides DevSecOps solutions for software supply chain security, including static and dynamic code scanning, software component analysis (SCA) to generate SBOM lists, etc. At the same time, it integrates various testing tools, providing comprehensive continuous testing solutions from unit testing to performance testing. In contrast, Jenkins and other tools have limited support in these areas.
High Degree of Openness: Zadig not only has built-in support for mainstream tool chains but also provides access methods such as OpenAPI and custom development tasks, allowing enterprises to customize according to their own processes, reducing the cost of using fragmented tool chains. Jenkins and other tools often can only solve specific problems in a single dimension, making it difficult to avoid fragmentation issues after expansion.
Through these advantages, Zadig not only improves development efficiency and product quality but also reduces the R&D and operation and maintenance costs of enterprises, becoming a powerful force driving enterprise innovation and development.
# Technical Leaders, You Need to Make Wise Decisions
Currently, many advanced enterprises have begun to abandon self-developed DevOps platforms based on Jenkins in favor of mature cloud-native technologies like Zadig. The reason behind this shift is obvious: the cost of self-built platforms is difficult to control, and the risk is relatively high. In this case, why invest large amounts of money to build a solution that may not succeed?
Despite this, there are still technical managers who have not recognized this point and insist on developing on their own, believing that Jenkins can achieve all the functions of Zadig at a lower cost with independent intellectual property rights. However, this approach ignores an important fact: the continuous plugin expansion and secondary development based on Jenkins not only increases the complexity of R&D management but also consumes a large amount of human resources. In today's world, where cloud-native and artificial intelligence technologies are about to be widely applied in various industries, this outdated "intellectual property" and "technical capability" have instead become obstacles to team capability improvement and rapid enterprise development.
In addition, some managers are concerned that using Zadig will reduce team technical display and increase costs, worrying that the team is "just" doing configuration work on Zadig, and believing that the final effect is not much different from using Jenkins. In response to this, my view is that excellent tools can greatly improve team work efficiency. Zadig is like a high-speed train, which can significantly increase R&D productivity by 1-5 times, reduce building computing resource consumption by 60%, and reduce operation and maintenance manual operations by 80%, thus enabling the team to focus on higher-level innovation tasks. These benefits can be proven through quantifiable return on investment (ROI), and as a technical leader, you should pay attention to these opportunities.
There are also some managers who are hesitant about adopting new technologies, worrying that the team is unfamiliar with Zadig's source code and cannot solve problems in a timely manner. In reality, how much do colleagues who are truly familiar with Jenkins understand its source code? More reasons are due to habit formation and the discomfort of switching from "horse-drawn carriages to automobiles." At the same time, Zadig is 100% open source, and in a commercial environment, it can provide a full set of engineering code to strategic cooperative enterprises. Source code is not the problem; what matters is the courage to accept new technologies, solve practical problems, and create enterprise value. I suggest letting team members personally try using Zadig to complete a project; they will experience its smooth and convenient operation.
