While we have been building our in-house capabilities for DevOps, we’ve always been spending a lot of time in researching and standardising the toolset. Our decisions are based on our experience around the complex infrastructure and challenges around it.
Jenkins - Hands down, one of the best open source continuous integration engines. It was meant to be a CI tool but later on it was extended to be a CD tool with plugins like build-pipeline. Some people (like me), were too much into love and even called it the complete solution. Although, with time and a few hard lessons, I learnt that there are better alternatives for deployment and operations like Rundeck, which gives you more visibility and granular control. (Checkout this blog post to setup Rundeck in less than 2 minutes.)
However, I was hopeful. I was waiting for Jenkins to reinvent itself.
And, look at em. What a comeback!
Screencast Series:
We thought it would be cool to do a hands on screencast series as a tribute to one of our favorite tools. Also, it can be very useful for beginners, who have just started exploring Jenkins 2.0.
Jenkins 2.0 - Setup with Docker from The Remote Lab on Vimeo.
Initial Feedback:
I’m loving the new Jenkins UI, the way security works, treating pipeline as code. Jenkinsfile is also introduced with this new version - it’s a container for your pipeline (or other) script, which details what specific steps are needed to perform a job for which you want to use Jenkins. In some cases it’s even overlapping with existing configuration management technologies.
Commands used in the Demo:
Apart from the shiny new look and one stop shop for documentation, the new release is exciting mainly because of two features:
- Pipeline as Code
- Multibranch Pipeline
With the introduction of the Pipeline plugin, users now can implement a project’s entire build/test/deploy pipeline in a Jenkinsfile and store that alongside their code, treating their pipeline as another piece of code checked into source control.
We will cover all of that with hands on demonstrations in upcoming screencasts.