When industries are running towards automation, adopting different DevOps tools to solve their industrial use-cases. In this race, Jenkins is one the most promising tool. These automation tools not only automate the thing but also help in reducing the cost.
Jenkins is an open-source server that is written entirely in Java. It lets you execute a series of actions to achieve the continuous integration process in an automated fashion. It is a free source that can handle any kind of build or continuous integration. You can integrate Jenkins with a number of testing and deployment technologies. Jenkins supports the complete development life cycle of software from building, testing, documenting the software, deploying, and other stages of the software development life cycle.
History of Jenkins
Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who is a Java developer, working at SUN Microsystems, was tired of building the code and fixing errors repetitively. In 2004, he created an automation server called Hudson that automates build and test task.
In 2011, Oracle who owned Sun Microsystems had a dispute with Hudson open source community, so they forked Hudson and renamed it as Jenkins.
Both Hudson and Jenkins continued to operate independently. But in short span of time, Jenkins acquired a lot of contributors and projects while Hudson remained with only 32 projects. Then with time, Jenkins became more popular, and Hudson is not maintained anymore.
What is Continuous Integration?
Continuous Integration is a process of integrating code changes from multiple developers in a single project many times. The software is tested immediately after a code commit. With each code commit, code is built and tested. If the test is passed, the build is tested for deployment. If the deployment is successful, the code is pushed to production.
How does Jenkins work?
Jenkins is a server-based application and requires a web server like Apache Tomcat to run on various platforms like Windows, Linux, macOS, Unix, etc. To use Jenkins, you need to create pipelines which are a series of steps that a Jenkins server will take. Jenkins Continuous Integration Pipeline is a powerful instrument that consists of a set of tools designed to host, monitor, compile and test code, or code changes, like:
- Continuous Integration Server (Jenkins, Bamboo, CruiseControl, TeamCity, and others)
- Source Control Tool (e.g., CVS, SVN, GIT, Mercurial, Perforce, ClearCase and others)
- Build tool (Make, ANT, Maven, Ivy, Gradle, and others)
- Automation testing framework (Selenium, Appium, TestComplete, UFT, and others)
Code commit built, and test cycle was very infrequent, and a single build was done after many days. The code is built and test as soon as Developer commits code. Jenkin will build and test code many times during the day
If the build is successful, then Jenkins will deploy the source into the test server and notifies the deployment team.
Workflow:
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 Jenkins project.
- So far around 280 tickets are closed, and the project publishes 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 tool 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.
- Due to CI/CD, it detects errors quickly and that saves the time of developer as well.
Disadvantages of using Jenkins
Though Jenkins is a very powerful tool, it has its flaws.
- Its interface is out dated and not user friendly compared to current UI trends.
- Though Jenkins is loved by many developers, it’s not that easy to maintain it because Jenkins runs on a server and requires some skills as server administrator to monitor its activity.
- One of the reasons why many people don’t implement Jenkins is due to its difficulty in installing and configuring Jenkins.
- Continuous integrations regularly break due to some small setting changes. Continuous integration will be paused and therefore requires some developer attention.
Jenkins Architecture
Jenkins follows Master-Slave architecture to manage distributed builds. In this architecture, slave and master communicate through TCP/IP protocol.
Jenkins architecture has two components:
- Jenkins Master/Server
- Jenkins Slave/Node/Build Server
Jenkins Tutorial
Jenkins Tutorial is designed for both beginners and professionals. Our Tutorial provides all the basic and advanced concepts of Jenkins, such as Jenkins installation, Jenkins Configuration, Jenkins Pipeline, etc.
Jenkins Master
The main server of Jenkins is the Jenkins Master. It is a web dashboard which is nothing but powered from a war file. By default it runs on 8080 port. With the help of Dashboard, we can configure the jobs/projects but the build takes place in Nodes/Slave. By default one node (slave) is configured and running in Jenkins server. We can add more nodes using IP address, user name and password using the ssh, jnlp or webstart methods.
The server’s job or master’s job is to handle:
- Scheduling build jobs.
- Dispatching builds to the nodes/slaves for the actual execution.
- Monitor the nodes/slaves (possibly taking them online and offline as required).
- Recording and presenting the build results.
- A Master/Server instance of Jenkins can also execute build jobs directly.
Jenkins Slave
Jenkins slave is used to execute the build jobs dispatched by the master. We can configure a project to always run on a particular slave machine, or particular type of slave machine, or simple let the Jenkins to pick the next available slave/node.
As we know Jenkins is developed using Java is platform independent thus Jenkins Master/Servers and Slave/nodes can be configured in any servers including Linux, Windows, and Mac.
Case Study of Topdanmark
Since the company relies heavily on IT-infrastructure, it is imperative that every bit just works.
With roughly 400 IT-related employees in the company and just about 80 on the operations team, the rest of the developers support approximately 2,000 other employees. Within the Ops group, There are six-man DevTools team who maintain the server platform that runs most of the company’s client/customer-related business applications. They keep approximately 1,000 servers alive. The servers are put into different categories, depending on which environment they live in.
Building automation with a highly-configurable Jenkins platform
Most of Topdanmark’s servers and all their desktops are virtualized, so they are easy to replace if something breaks down. In terms of Jenkins installations, they are all virtual.
Topdanmark has two Jenkins setups, legacy and CI/CD. In legacy setup, They have test, integration, release, and production environments. In CI/CD setup, they have a non-production and a production environment.
The legacy setup is part of a pre-scheduled handheld deployment cycle, customized to whichever team uses it. Due to all the customizations, it could take several days from the developer request to having a working Jenkins instance. This is ofcourse take several time but using CI/CD will make it easy and fast.
The new setup is automated and easier to maintain. For this new iteration, the team took a different, more modern approach to deliver the service to its users. They created a self-service portal that allows anyone within the company to ‘order’ a Jenkins instance, a huge timesaver.
Driving developer success with automation and responsiveness
Due to the very nature of development and a constant flow of business needs, it’s imperative for organizations to support developers by supplying tools and solutions that allow them to create the software needed to solve the task at hand.
The secret behind this is that all the new Jenkins instances are based on spinning up a custom Jenkins Docker image, bootstrapping some multi-branch configuration — like predefined plugins — and creating the multi branch repositories from one or more GitHub organizations that are part of the request-form.
To simplify the user experience even further, Topdanmark created quite a few Groovy scripts that can be used in the Jenkinsfiles. They basically hide all the complicated stuff but maintain control regarding internal audits, and other corporate rules.
Topdenmark:
Topdanmark, a Danish insurance company offering a customer service platform that allows clients to easily and quickly manage their insurance, investments and pensions.
Jenkins is a very advance tool of DevOps that is making things extremely easy and fast. Using this tool industries are really making their technology better and could be able to provide their service better.
I hope you got an idea on importance of jenkins
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