Industry Use Cases of Jenkins
What is Jenkins?
Jenkins — an open-source automation server that enables developers around the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software.
Why Jenkins?
Jenkins is widely used in most of the industry because of the following features:
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery: As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into the continuous delivery hub for any project.
Easy installation: Jenkins is a self-contained Java-based program, ready to run out-of-the-box, with packages for Windows, Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like operating systems.
Easy configuration: Jenkins can be easily set up and configured via its web interface, which includes on-the-fly error checks and built-in help.
Plugins: With hundreds of plugins in the Update Center, Jenkins integrates with practically every tool in the continuous integration and continuous delivery toolchain.
Extensible: Jenkins can be extended via its plugin architecture, providing nearly infinite possibilities for what Jenkins can do.
Distributed: Jenkins can easily distribute work across multiple machines, helping drive builds, tests, and deployments across multiple platforms faster.
Industry Use Cases of Jenkins:
1. Synchronization with Slack:
A large team uses a centralized platform for communication. Slack is one of such most popular platforms. Slack integration can be done to Jenkins and thus communication such as activities that have been triggered, its time, users name, results, etc. can be shared with other people.
2. Greater data support for project management:
For project management, each activity is wrapped as a Jenkins job. For each Jenkins job, success or failure can be identified, and job completion time can be measured.
Jenkins supports REST API or SDK to measure success, failure or time.
Some useful Jenkins plugins are given below:
- Pipeline Plugin,
- Slack Plugin,
- thinBackup,
- Timestamper,
- Dashboard View,
- JobConfigHistory Plugin,
- Build-timeout,
- Navigator Plugin,
- Git Plugin, and
- GitHub pulls the request builder plugin.
3. Manual Tests option:
Sometimes things work great locally but fail when pushed on a central system. This happens because, by the time they push, things change. Continuous Integration tests the code against the current state of a code base and is done in the production-like environment.
4. Increased Code Coverage:
CI servers such as Jenkins can check code for test coverage. Tests increases code coverage. This inspires transparency and accountability in team members. Results of tests are displayed on the build pipeline which ensures team members follow required guild lines. Code coverage similar to code review ensures that testing is a transparent process among team members.
5. Jenkins lowers the Effort of repeated coding:
with the use of Jenkins, one can convert a command prompt code into a GUI button click. This can be done by wrapping up the script as a Jenkins job. Parameterized Jenkins jobs can be created for customization or to take user input. Thus, hundreds of lines of code writing can be saved.
6. Integration of Individual Jobs:
Jenkins jobs are usually small tools. They serve small purposes and quite simple. Jenkins provides a pipeline plugin using which multiple jobs can be combined. Pipelining provides such a benefit which Linux users can understand more than anyone. Both sequential or parallel combination is possible.
Advantages of using Jenkins:
- Jenkins is being managed by the community which is very open. Every month, they hold public meetings and take inputs from the public for the development of the Jenkins project.
- So far around 280 tickets are closed, and the project publishes a stable release every three months.
- As technology grows, so does Jenkins. So far Jenkins has around 320 plugins published in its plugins database. With plugins, Jenkins becomes even more powerful and feature-rich.
- Jenkins also supports cloud-based architecture so that you can deploy Jenkins in cloud-based platforms.
- The reason why Jenkins became popular is that it was created by a developer for developers.
CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION(CI):
Continuous integration is a practice that forces developers to frequently integrate their code into a central repository. Instead of building out new features to the end without any quality measurement, every change is tested against the central repository in order to anticipate errors. Every developer commits daily to a shared mainline and every commit triggers an automated process to build and test. If building or testing fails it can be detected and fixed within minutes without compromising the whole structure, workflow, and project. In that way, it is possible to isolate problems, solving them faster, and provide higher-quality products.
CONTINUOUS DELIVERY (CD):
Continuous delivery is the ability to make changes of all types such as new features, configuration changes, error fixes, experiments into production in a safe and efficient manner using short work cycles. The main goal in continuous delivery is to make deployments predictable as routine activities that can be achieved upon request. To be successful, the code needs to always be in a deployable state even when there is a scenario with lots of developers working and making changes on a daily basis. All of the code progress and changes are delivered in a nonstop way with high quality and low risks. The end result is one or more artifacts that can be deployed to production.
CONTINUOUS DEPLOYMENT (CD):
Continuous deployment, also known as continuous implementation, is an advanced stage of continuous delivery that the automation process does not end at the delivery stage. In this methodology, every change that is validated at the automatic testing stage is later implemented at the production stage.
The fail-fast strategy is always of the utmost importance when deploying to production. Since every change is deployed to production, it is possible to identify edge cases and unexpected behaviors that would be very hard to identify with automated tests. To fully take advantage of continuous deployment, it is important to have solid logging technology that allows you to identify the increasing error count on newer versions. In addition, a trustworthy orchestration technology like Kubernetes will allow the new version to slowly be deployed to users until the full rollout or an incident is detected and the version is canceled.
Automation:
As a job executor, Jenkins can be used to automate repetitive tasks like backup/restore databases, turn on or turn off machines, collect statistics about service and other tasks. Since every job can be scheduled, repetitive tasks can have the desired time interval (like once a day, once a week, every fifth day of the month, and so forth).
Jenkins Pipeline :
A Jenkins pipeline is a combination of jobs, tasks, or events that are connected to each other in a sequence. In other words, it is a group of plugins that enable continuous delivery pipelines to be easily integrated and implemented. Extendable automation works to support a pipeline in the creation of both complex and simple delivery pipelines in the form of code and with the help of domain-specific language or DSL.
So that’s all for today. Will come back again with another interesting article. Thanks for reading.
Connect with me on LinkedIn :-
