Jenkins — Industry Use-Cases, Case-Study | Arth |
Introduction
What is Jenkins
Jenkins is an open-source & free automation software used for the continuous integration & continuous delivery(CI/CD). Jenkins manages and controls software delivery processes throughout the entire life-cycle, including build, document, test, package, stage, deployment, static code analysis and much more.
What is Jenkins Pipeline
Jenkins Pipeline is a combination of plugins that supports integration and implementation of continuous delivery pipelines. It has an extensible automation server to create simple and complex delivery pipelines as code via pipeline DSL. A Pipeline is a group of events interlinked with each other in a sequence.
Continuous delivery pipeline in Jenkins contains a collection of four states which are build, deploy, test and release. These jobs or events are interlinked to each other. Every state has its jobs, which work in a sequence called a continuous delivery pipeline.
Jenkins is a continuous integration server which has the ability to support the automation of software development processes. You can create several automation jobs with the help of use cases, and run them as a Jenkins pipeline.
JenkinsFile
Jenkins Pipeline can be defined from a code file called JenkinsFile. You can implement pipeline as code using JenkinsFile, and this can be defined by using a DSL (Domain Specific Language). With the help of JenkinsFile, you can write the steps required for running a Jenkins Pipeline.
Use-Cases Of Jenkins
Jenkins Then V/S Now
Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the original author/creator of Jenkins(Formerly known as Hudsen), while working in Sun Microsystems in 2004 faces issues of forgetting to commit some files. So he thought if there is way through which these tasks can automated. Another motivation for him was that he was working in a group of Sun Microsystems that designed and developed JavaEE (the framework layer for server applications written in Java), and he wanted write apps on top of it, he thought this could be a good way to make him learn JavaEE.
He created Hudsen as an open-source continuous integration tool. However, after recent updates, it has become a tool that is capable of performing two jobs — continuous integration and continuous delivery. It is now a tool that helps in organizing application deployment as well.
Jenkins currently is the most widely adopted solution for continuous delivery, thanks to its vibrant and active community. The Jenkins community have more than 1,700 plugins that helps Jenkins to integrate with any third party tool like Git-hub. Jenkins continuously growing as the dominant solution for software process automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery and, as of Feb 2018, there are more than 165,000 active installations and an estimated 1.65 million users around the world.
Benefits Of Jenkins
- Jenkins is an open-source tool, easy to install and use. We don’t need extra components to use it.
- It is free and available for different OS.
- It is widely used, have active community, so finding support is not a big problem.
- Jenkins automates all integration work. Integration issues are scarce, and so, it helps in saving time and money over the project lifecycle.
- It is easy to configure, extend, and modify. It allows the instant generation of tests and building, automation, and deployment of code on different platforms.
- Jenkins can be configured to run CI and CD concepts properly.
- It can easily detect and fix issues. The software is always ready for a sudden release.
- Supports a variety of plugins, which allows better flexibility
- It helps in detecting errors very early, thus saving developers a lot of time and hard work.
Case-Study
- D4Science
To promote open science practices and support scientific communities D4Science introduced a new delivery pipeline that replaced their pre-existing build platform. Using Jenkins, they created an innovative approach to software delivery: a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, scalable, easy to maintain, and upgradable at a minimal cost.
- Gainsight
It’s customer service experience platform helps customer success teams at more than 100 leading IT and healthcare clients by driving engagement for tens of thousands of their customers.
That’s why the engineering team at Gainsight approached the customer experience by building a smarter, faster DevSecOps platform using Jenkins. They stuck to an infrastructure-as-code approach while integrating various tools and programming languages all within the platform. And they secured processes with better visibility and air-tight quality control.
The result was a flexible DevSecOps infrastructure, 95% of which is scalable with code. And the cost of infrastructure costs was 40% less. That provides Gainsight with ease of collaboration, keener operational insight, and — because builds are 30% faster — the ability to stay a step ahead of the competition.
That’s All For the Article
