Industry use cases of Jenkins

In this article, you will find how jenkins made developers life easier with automating most of the tasks. In 2021, When industries are running towards automation, adopting different DevOps tools to solve their industrial use-cases. In this race, Jenkins is one of the most promising tool.

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is an open source Continuous Integration server capable of orchestrating a chain of actions that help to achieve the Continuous Integration process in an automated fashion. Jenkins is free and is entirely written in Java. Jenkins is a widely used application around the world. It is server-based application. Jenkins became popular as it solved the problem of monitoring the repeated tasks with the evolving Projects. While making a project, there are multiple teams working on the same project. And, it is very important to pass the feedbacks within teams for faster development. As humans are always slow, Jenkin i.e a centralized program came into the picture that can integrate various components of a Software Development LifeCycle Eg: Build, SCM, Testing, Deployment etc. It is integration tool. By using Jenkins, software companies can accelerate their software development process, as Jenkins can automate build and test at a rapid rate. Jenkins supports the complete development lifecycle of software from building, testing, documenting the software, deploying and other stages of a software development lifecycle.

What is Continuous Integration?

In Continuous Integration after a code commit, the software is built and tested immediately. In a large project with many developers, commits are made many times during a day. With each commit code is built and tested. If the test is passed, build is tested for deployment. If deployment is a success, the code is pushed to production. This commit, build, test, and deploy is a continuous process and hence the name continuous integration/deployment.

Why we need CI?

• Run your test cases in the real world.
• Increase code coverage.
• Deploy your code to production.
• Build stuff faster without breaking the code(master build is broken)
• Decrease code review time.

CI is one of the use case of Jenkins.

There are various industry use cases of Jenkins.

1. Jenkins lowers the Effort of repeated coding

with the uses of Jenkins, one can convert a command prompt code into a GUI button click. This can be done by wrapping up the script as a Jenkins job. Parameterized Jenkins jobs can be created for customization or to take user input. Thus, hundreds of lines of code writing can be saved.

2. Slack integration

A large team uses a centralized platform for communication. Slack is one such most popular platform. Slack integration can be done to Jenkins and thus communication such as activities have been triggered, its time, users name, results etc. can be shared with other people.

3. Effortless Auditing

Jenkins jobs, when run, capture console output from stdout as well as stderr. Troubleshooting with the uses of Jenkins is also very clear. For performance tuning each individual job, run timing can be measured and slowest step can be identified using Time stamper plugin.

4. Greater data support for project management

For project management, each activity is wrapped as a Jenkins job. For each Jenkins job, success or failure can be identified, and job completion time can be measured. Jenkins supports REST API or SDK to measure success, failure or time.

5. Integration of Individual Jobs

Jenkins jobs are usually small tools. They serve small purposes and quite simple. Jenkins provides pipeline plugin using which multiple jobs can be combined. Pipelining provides such benefit which Linux users can understand more than anyone. Both sequential or parallel combination is possible.

6. Manual Tests option

Sometimes things work great locally but fail when pushed on a central system. This happens because, by the time they push, things change. Continuous Integration tests the code against the current state of a code base and is done in the production-like environment.

7. Code deployment to Production

Jenkins or another CI system can deploy code to staging or production automatically if all the tests written for the same within a specific feature or release branch are green. This is formally known as Continuous Deployment as well. Changes before a merge activity can be made visible too. This can be done in a dynamic staging environment, and after they are merged it is deployed directly to a central staging system, pre-production system or even a production environment.

• All the CI needs are also satisfied by Jenkins.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are the most important part of the DevOps world and Jenkins is the most famous continuous integration and continuous delivery tool. With CI/CD, industries can accelerate their development process. Let’s understand what is Continuous Integration(CI) and Continuous Delivery(CD) first.

Continuous Integration(CI)

In development practice, while developing any software developers need to program and test their code. There are many developers working on the same project over an SCM tool. They need an environment where they can test it quickly. As fast as they test, they can detect the error and solve that quickly. Using continuous integration tools all things become automate and as the code is pushed the testing begins.

Jenkins achieves Continuous Integration with the help of plugins. The plugin provides the ability to integrate with various DevOps stages.

Continuous Delivery(CD)

In DevOps, when you make changes to your product, such as modifying configuration or adding new features quickly and safely by keeping the code in a deployable state all the time, we call it Continuous Delivery.

Continuous Delivery makes deployments routine affairs. The deployments could be of an embedded system or an extensively distributed system. In this process, the changes in your code get automatically prepared, tested, and built. You do so by removing the hardening, testing, and integration phases that are usually present in ‘dev complete.

Let’s see how Netflix is using Jenkins for better services.

Netflix uses Jenkins for CI/CD. As early cloud adopters, Netflix teams quickly learned to automate build and test processes, and heavily leveraged Jenkins, evolving from a single massive Jenkins master in their data centre, to running more than 25 Jenkins masters in AWS. Jenkins had completely changed the software development and deployment by providing continuous integration. As the developers at Netflix develops and test the code at Nebula. After that, the code is pushed to the git repo.

Now, the git repository is configured with the web hooks that triggers the jenkins job whenever it detects some changes in the code. Changes in the code happens only when developer pushes newer code. Now, the jenkins job is to run the Nebula which will build, test and deploy the updated code. Later in the deployment part, the code will be exposed as a package and then it will be build according to the OS configurations. Example: RPM package.

Thank you for reading 😃.

📚 Keep Learning, Keep Sharing 📚