Industry Use cases — Jenkins
The two teams involving in actual deployment of the server are the developer team and operations team. The development of the code for the application is done by the developer team and the deployment of the application on top of the IT infrastructure is maintained by the Operations team. Deploying various applications inside different environments requires some changes and declaration of variables inside the code which again is to be done by the developer team. Hence there should be a good communication between the Developer team and the Operations team.
Any enterprise has a common communication barrier called as SILOS between the developer and the operations teams. So effective communication is not possible and since there is human interference in the process , the complete workflow becomes even slower which results in the delay in the release of further updated versions of the application. To solve this and to make this process even faster we use Jenkins.
What actually is Jenkins ???
Jenkins is an open source continuous integration/continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD) automation software DevOps tool written in the Java programming language. It is used to implement CI/CD workflows, called pipelines.
History of Jenkins !!!!!
Jenkins is a fork of a project called Hudson, which was trademarked by Oracle. Hudson was eventually donated to the Eclipse Foundation and is no longer under development. Jenkins development is now managed as an open source project under the governance of the CD Foundation, an organization within the Linux Foundation. Continuous integration has evolved since its conception. Originally, a daily build was the standard. Now, the usual rule is for each team member to submit work, called a commit, on a daily (or more frequent) basis and for a build to be conducted with each significant change. When used properly, continuous integration provides various benefits, such as constant feedback on the status of the software. Because CI detects deficiencies early on in development, defects are typically smaller, less complex and easier to resolve. Over time, continuous delivery and deployment features have been added to Jenkins. Continuous delivery is the process of automating the building and packaging of code for eventual deployment to test, production staging, and production environments. Continuous deployment automates the final step of deploying the code to its final destination.
Who is using Jenkins?
Many companies, open source projects and other organisations use Jenkins. Here are just a few of them. There are far too many Jenkins users to list them all here,
and far too may companies.
Plugins
A plugin is an enhancement to the Jenkins system. They help extend Jenkins capabilities and integrated Jenkins with other software. Plugins can be downloaded from the online Jenkins Plugin repository and loaded using the Jenkins Web UI or CLI. Currently, the Jenkins community claims over 1500 plugins available for a wide range of uses.
Plugins help to integrate other developer tools into the Jenkins environment, add new user interface elements to the Jenkins Web UI, help with administration of Jenkins, and enhance Jenkins for build and source code management. One of the more common uses of plugins is to provide integration points for CI/CD sources and destinations. These include software version control systems (SVCs) such as Git and Atlassian BitBucket, container runtime systems — especially Docker, virtual machine hypervisors such as VMware vSphere, public cloud instances including Google Cloud Platform and Amazon AWS, and private cloud systems such as OpenStack. There are also plugins that assist in communicating with operating systems over FTP, CIFS, and SSH.
Disadvantages of Jenkins :
The open source system is also a single server architecture. This makes it easy to install but caps resources to those of a single computer, virtual machine or container. Jenkins does not allow for federation across servers resulting in performance issues. Lack of federation can also lead to a proliferation of independent Jenkins servers that are difficult to manage across a large enterprise.
Jenkins relies on older Java architectures and technology, specifically servlets and Maven. Even the Jenkins Docker installation still requires that the Jenkins code and servlet middleware be packaged into a container together, maintaining its monolithic architecture. In addition, it is not designed to be implemented using newer JaJava technology such as Spring Boot or GraalVM.