Should i use jenkins




















Software developers cost companies an average of six figures USD per year per engineer. Holy mackerel—that's a lot to spend on someone to channel all their talents and time into just your free tool.

To try to counter this, many teams try to distribute the work of managing Jenkins through "self-service," and let different team members manage their Jenkins instances. But this causes problems too. Jenkins is a by-design "democratic" tool, allowing anyone to create projects, configure agents, install plugins, etc.

But like too much of any good thing, too much self-service can cause problems. Namely, these problems are speed, vulnerability, and longevity.

Because anyone can install any plugin, odds are that you will not know who installed a plugin, why they installed it, how often it's being used, or whether it can be removed without breaking anything; Jenkins doesn't indicate any of this. Heck, some plugins get automatically added because another plugin requires that plugin. If a less-thorough colleague doesn't seek answers to ALL these questions from the people who installed them and modifies or deletes a plugin, your stuff can break.

And if all these plugins are on your controller, you end up with a sluggish Jenkins that may result in more failed builds. Because anyone can install any plugin—which are not of equal quality—it's too easy to introduce vulnerabilities or even malware into your Jenkins installations.

To avoid this, perhaps you'll require your developers to get approval and advice on installing plugins from Jenkins expert And when your information relies on human memory and manual intervention for updates, your Jenkins pipelines become "legacy" much faster than competing tools' pipelines.

Though there is a plugin for folders and views, you can't categorize or organize Jenkins projects easily or clearly without work. What ends up happening is that you have no idea who owns what Jenkins project.

You could accidentally work on someone else's project and mess it up, delete it and mess it up, or someone else can mess with your project and potentially lock the entire Jenkins instance. Lack of visibility leads to confusion, which slows down work and could risk more than just lost time. Young devs have plenty of time, energy, and passion but have no money.

Because plugins are created by the Jenkins community, they won't always have what you may consider "basic features," and not all plugins are supported by Jenkinsfile which is exported Jenkins configuration. To back up Jenkins, you have to manually write down a list of plugins and manually install them, and then configure those plugins manually.

Compare this to other tools that allow scheduled, automated backups. In a similar way, doing "Jenkins as Code" requires extra, manual effort at scale, because different departments will spawn different and often multiple Jenkins instances. Another thing that slows you down is Jenkins's database, which is basically just XML. This was originally designed with interoperability in mind, not performance. As a result the verbose and dynamic nature of the xml format makes it relatively expensive to read and more so to index.

And perhaps most importantly: scaled organizations rely on constant up-time. This requires high-availability and load balancing, which Jenkins cannot do with just a single controller.

You can "duct tape" solutions together as a standby failover, but as with any duct-taped solution these often have performance issues. Whether you love it or loathe it, Jenkins is here to stay. Maximize developer time, minimize release risk, and empower stakeholders to bring their vision to life faster, all with the people and technology you have right now.

Down to Zero is a practical guide to solving bugs. Our team has been developing mobile apps for over a decade and we'd like to share some tips we've picked up along the way. Get the Ebook for Free. CI is run on a shared server that increases visibility, so all the engineers on a project are aware of changes in the base code day in and day out.

In addition, you can configure the server to alert developers when they submit failing code so that they can fix any errors they introduce. Using CI automation allows you to shorten development release cycles and improve product quality. CI essentially lets your team use machines do what they do best, so humans can do what brings more value to a company. There are various levels of testing that you can implement.

The most basic test is whether or not the code actually compiles. Your team can write more complex tests to cover other bases as well, including unit, integration, stress, regression testing, etc.

A CI service compiles and tests a full application possibly by running the application in an emulator. Continuous delivery also pushes this compiled application to a repository, for example, for alpha testers to use and provide early feedback. CD builds are automatically deployed through to the production environment and can also be used for broader beta testing.

CD is aimed at lean-logistics: automating the process from adding new code through to acceptance testing. CD automates all the steps so that your build is ready to be deployed. This allows for faster, smaller deployments of your product which reduce deployment risk. Regular, smaller, leaner deliveries are less risky that huge ones that only occur once or twice a year. A lot of people talk about CI because it is considered a best practice to have all code verified automatically on every commit, regularly run tests, and continuously deploy—for the reasons mentioned above.

The process checks that the contributions from each developer work well together. 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:. Some people might think that the old-fashioned way of developing the software is the better way. Let us imagine, that there are around 10 developers who are working on a shared repository.

Some developer completes their task in 25 days while others take 30 days to complete. 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.

I am sure all of you aware of old phone Nokia. Nokia used to implement a procedure called nightly build. After multiple commits from diverse developers during the day, the software built every night. Later, they adopted Continuous Integration approach.

The software was built and tested as soon as a developer committed code. You can use a number of post-condition blocks within the post section: always , changed , failure , success , unstable , and aborted. For example, the Jenkinsfile below always runs JUnit after the Test stage, but only sends an email if the pipeline fails.

The declarative pipeline can express most of what you need to define pipelines, and is much easier to learn than the scripted pipeline syntax, which is a Groovy-based DSL.

The scripted pipeline is in fact a full-blown programming environment. With Blue Ocean installed, your Jenkins main menu will have an extra icon:. You can open Blue Ocean directly if you wish.

Pipeline creation in Blue Ocean is a bit more graphical than in plain Jenkins:. As I mentioned earlier, Jenkins is also distributed as a Docker image. Every branch with a Jenkinsfile will get a pipeline. Once you have run some pipelines, the Blue Ocean plug-in will display their status, as shown above.

You can zoom in on an individual pipeline to see the stages and steps:. There are specialized considerations for some other use cases. Android runs a kind of Java, but introduces the issue of how to test on the wide range of Android devices. The Android emulator plug-in allows you to build and test on as many emulated devices as you care to define.

The Google Play Publisher plug-in lets you send builds to an alpha channel in Google Play for release or further testing on actual devices. Docker containers are very useful in a Jenkins environment for improving speed, scalability, and consistency. There are two major use cases for Jenkins and GitHub.



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