Jenkins in today’s world
What is Jenkins?
Jenkins is an automation tool used by DevOps teams looking to bring continuous integration into their projects.
It is an opensource software built in Java.
It is also used for continuous delivery of projects. It allows developers to integrate changes much easily into their projects.
Continuous Integration
Continuous delivery is a part of the software development process that enables us to release the development immediately after testing. Automation of Jenkins allows companies to speed up their software development process quite significantly. Plugins are very important for ensuring continuous integration.
Jenkins Pipeline
A Jenkins pipeline is a combination of jobs, tasks, or events that are connected to each other in a sequence. A continuous delivery pipeline is a sequence that events of each of these states work in. All the changes that are made to the software have to pass through several complex processes before the software is released. This process also ensures that the software is developed in a repeatable and reliable way and involves multiple testing and deployment stages.
Jenkins architecture
Jenkins manages the builds with the help of master-slave architecture. Master and slave units communicate with each other using IP/TCP protocol.
Jenkins master
This is the primary server of Jenkins. It handles a number of tasks that include but are not limited to scheduling build jobs, recording and presenting build results, dispatching builds to slaves for execution, monitoring all the slaves offline as well as online, and others. Master Jenkins is capable of directly executing build jobs.
Jenkins slave
It runs on the remote server. The Jenkins server follows the requests of the Jenkins master and is compatible with all operating systems. Building jobs dispatched by the master are executed by the slave. The project can be suitably configured to choose a specific slave machine.
Features offered by Jenkins
Easy installation -Jenkins is an open-source tool that is extremely easy to install and use. You need no extra components to use it
Free Open Source -It is free and available to be used with different platforms, such as Windows, Linux, macOS, and others
Automation -Jenkins automates all integration work. Integration issues are scarce, and so, it helps in saving time and money over the project lifecycle.
Easy configuration -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
Extensibles -Supports a variety of plugins, which allows better flexibility
Easy trouble shooting -It helps in detecting errors very early, thus saving developers a lot of time and hard work.It can easily detect and fix issues. The software is always ready for a sudden release
Nokia — using Jenkins
Nokia used to implement a procedure called nightly build. After multiple commits from diverse developers during the day, the software built every night. Since the software was built only once in a day, it’s a huge pain to isolate, identify, and fix the errors in a large code base.
Later, they adopted Continuous Integration approach. The software was built and tested as soon as a developer committed code. If any error is detected, the respective developer can quickly fix the defect.
Conclusion
Jenkins is an excellent system for your software development and software testing work. The main advantages of Jenkins are it is portability, high-quality documentation, and a great user support. Additionally, it’s open-source, free of cost, easy to install and configure, and highly customizable. In a nutshell, Jenkins can make your life a lot easier.
