Industry Use Case of Jenkins

Shivam Upadhyay
4 min readAug 10, 2021

Development Before Jenkins

Developers had to finish code testing before they could check for bugs before they could use Jenkins. Developers on teams, who tended to work alone, each contributed substantial chunks of code to the base code. The entire source code would be verified for errors, which would be a time-consuming and difficult task. Multiple developers would send commits to version control at the same time, lengthening the time it took to find and fix errors. The software delivery process was slow, and there was no iterative code improvement. As a result, Jenkins came to their aid!

What is Jenkins and Continuous Integration?

Jenkins is a cross-platform open-source automation server that aids in the automation of the software deployment process. Jenkins, as a Continuous Integration tool, provides for continuous development, testing, and deployment of new code. Continuous Integration (CI) is a procedure in which developers commit changes to source code from a shared repository, and all of the changes are built-in real-time. This might happen several times every day. The CI Server monitors each commit in real-time, improving the efficiency of code builds and verification. This relieves the testers of their responsibilities, allowing for faster integration and less waste of resources.

Continuous Deployment ensures that the entire process outlined above is carried out automatically. Jenkins accomplishes this with the help of a number of plugins. Both console commands and graphical user interfaces are available for configuration. Jenkins’ main feature is that it may run a specified set of steps based on time or certain event triggers. Jenkins monitors the execution of these phases and, if they fail, the process is terminated. Jenkins alerts you when a build succeeds or fails.

What are the Jenkins Features?

Jenkins offers many attractive features for developers:

Easy Installation

Jenkins is a platform-independent, Java-based software that may be installed on Windows, Mac OS, and Unix-like operating systems.

Easy Configuration

Jenkins is easily set up and configured using its web interface, featuring error checks and a built-in help function.

Available Plugins

There are hundreds of plugins available in the Update Center, integrating with every tool in the CI and CD toolchain.

Extensible

Jenkins’ plugin architecture allows it to be expanded in almost any way, giving it practically limitless capabilities.

Easy Distribution

Jenkins can quickly distribute work across numerous machines, allowing for speedier builds, testing, and deployments on a variety of platforms.

Free Open Source

Jenkins is an open-source project with a large community behind it.

Industries Using Jenkins

Netflix

Netflix is a streaming service that makes award-winning TV series, movies, animation, documentaries, and other content available on thousands of internet-connected devices. As a result, Jenkins is heavily used by Netflix for its use case. A line of code is ready for continuous integration and deployment once it has been created and tested locally using Nebula. The modified source code should be pushed to a git repository as the initial step. Teams are able to use whichever git process they like.

A Jenkins job is started after the change is committed. The use of Jenkins for continuous integration at Netflix has evolved over time. They began with a single large Jenkins master in their data center and have since grown to 25 Jenkins masters on AWS. Above and beyond simple continuous integration, Jenkins is used throughout Netflix for a variety of automation activities.

The application code is built, tested, and packaged using Nebula, which is invoked via a Jenkins process. Nebula will publish the.jar to our artifact repository if the repository being produced is a library. The Nebula os package plugin will be used if the repository is an application.

Topdanmark

Topdanmark is a large Danish insurance company that chose Jenkins as their “de facto” CI/CD platform.

Challenge:

Maintaining old systems while balancing the needs of DevOps modernization and cloud migration.

Solution:

A highly configurable CI/CD platform that enables development automation and convenience.

Results:

  • 100% automated Jenkins instance generation
  • ability to release and deploy an artifact whenever and wherever software developers concentrate on development rather than operations
  • smaller monoliths and containerization

There are two Jenkins configurations at Topdanmark. They have two sets of systems: legacy and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). They have test, integration, release, and production environments in their historic setup. They have a non-production and a production environment in their CI/CD configuration.

“We used Jenkins because almost everyone knows what Jenkins is and how to use it. It is the ‘de facto’ product to use in our world. And it’s extremely configurable.” said DevTools engineer Jon Brohauge.

These were some of the industry use cases of Jenkins. Thank you for reading!!:)

Do connect me on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shivam-prasad-upadhyay/

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