Advantages of Jenkins

Dev and Ops are no longer exclusively separate roles within the IT department. Today, DevOps engineers reshape the way IT teams operate; improving collaboration between developers, sysadmins, and testers.

They also improve deployment rates, defect detection, and feature delivery. Essentially, it’s rooted in the idea that building, testing and releasing software can run more smoothly and automatically if the appropriate team of professionals is working together. You may find more info about it here. But in this article we would like to focus more on continuous integration tool: Jenkins; key advantages of Jenkins as well as how to do continuous integration with Jenkins!

Tools for DevOps

But a software development process can’t work efficiently without right tools. Similarly, in the case of DevOps, you can always benefit from the right set of tools. These tools help in information sharing, process automation, reduction in deployment time, in continuous deployment, etc.

The DevOps tools can be categorized in seven groups depending on its purpose in the particular stage of DevOps lifecycle:

Code (Version Control System): Git
Build (Continuous Integration): Jenkins, Travis, TeamCity
Test (Continuous testing, inspection): JMeter, Sonarqube
Package (Artifact repository): Artifactory
Configure & Release ( Change management, containerization ): Docker Compose
Infrastructure ( Orchestration, cloud ): Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos, AWS,Gcloud,Nexus
Monitor ( Manage the performance): ELK, Grafana

So, what is Jenkins?

In today’s DevOps world, continuous delivery and deployment are critical to delivering high-quality software product faster than ever before. Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server written in Java. It is by far the most widely used tool for managing continuous integration builds and delivery pipelines. It helps developers in building and testing software continuously. It increases the scale of automation and is quickly gaining popularity in DevOps circles. One of the key advantages of Jenkins is that it requires little maintenance and has built-in GUI tool for easy updates. Jenkins also provides customized solution as there are over 400 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project. Basically, Jenkins integrates development life-cycle processes of all kinds, including build, document, test, package, stage, deploy, static analysis and much more.

With Jenkins you could configure the alerts in several ways, for example, you receive the email notification, or a pop-up, etc. and actually automate it. By doing the right configuration, you get fast feedback. You will always know, right after you broke the build. You will get to know what the reason for job fail was and you can also get to know how you can revert it back.

Continuous Integration with Jenkins

Let us imagine a scenario where the complete source code of the application was built and then deployed on a test server for testing:

First, a developer commits the code to the source code repository.

Meanwhile, the Jenkins server checks the repository at regular intervals for changes.

Soon after a commit occurs, the Jenkins server detects the changes that have occurred in the source code repository.

Jenkins will pull those changes and will start preparing a new build.

If the build fails, then the concerned team will be notified.

If build is successful, then Jenkins deploys the built in the test server.

You could configure the pipeline (the script to run) to create the build with several steps:

Prepare, test (unit and integration tests), package, publish, deploy.

After running it, Jenkins generates a feedback, if these constraints are ok, the artifact is valid. And then Jenkins notifies the developers about the build and test results.

It will continue checking the source code repository for changes made in the source code and the whole process keeps on repeating (functional tests).

What are the advantages of Jenkins ?

It is open source and it is user-friendly, easy to install and does not require additional installations or components.
It is free of cost.
Easily Configurable. Jenkins can be easily modified and extended. It deploys code instantly, generates test reports. Jenkins can be configured according to the requirements for continuous integrations and continuous delivery.
Platform Independent. Jenkins is available for all platforms and different operating systems, whether OS X, Windows or Linux.
Rich Plugin ecosystem. The extensive pool of plugins makes Jenkins flexible and allows building, deploying and automating across various platforms.
Easy support. Because it is open source and widely used, there is no shortage of support from large online communities of agile teams.
Developer writes the tests to detect the errors of his/her code as fast as possible. So the developer’s time is saved without wasting on large-scale error-ridden integrations.
Issues are detected and resolved almost right away which keeps the software in a state where it can be released at any time safely.
Most of the integration work is automated. Hence integration issues are less. This saves both time and money over the lifespan of a project.

And Docker in conjunction with Jenkins is having a profound effect on development teams. Everyone knows that Docker streamlines development and makes deployment vastly easier.

Together Docker, Jenkins and its integrated ecosystem provide the coordinating software infrastructure for agile development.