Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

Anyone who has worked on a CI/CD platform knows the feeling: the tools are powerful, but too much energy goes into making everything talk to everything else. Teams sense there should be a better way, but the ecosystem keeps pulling them back toward custom integrations.

This is an industry inefficiency. When hundreds of organizations each build integrations for the same tools, enormous effort is spent solving the same problems again and again. We’ve accepted this as normal, but there’s another pattern.

This talk explores why the status quo must change. Not through better tooling or more connectors, but through the same shift that transformed railroads, email, and the internet: shared protocol.

You’ll see the architecture making this inevitable: CDEvents as a shared vocabulary for SDLC, Workflow Segments as the semantic meaning behind “build” and “deploy,” and Conduit as an orchestration engine that understands the entire workflow. We’ll examine where boundaries exist in every pipeline, and how tools that broadcast proof of reaching those boundaries can coordinate without custom integrations.

The future of CI/CD isn’t more integrations; it’s one integration, used by everyone.