What is Jenkins?
Jenkins is a self-contained, open-source automation server that can be used to automate all sorts of tasks related to building, testing, and delivering or deploying software.
Jenkins can be installed through native system packages, Docker, or even run standalone by any machine with a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed.
Jenkins is an open-source server that is written entirely in Java. It lets us execute a series of actions to achieve the continuous integration process, that too in an automated fashion
What is Jenkins used for?
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.
Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) embody a culture, set of operating principles, and collection of practices that enable application development teams to deliver code changes more frequently and reliably. The implementation is also known as the CI/CD pipeline.
CI/CD is one of the best practices for devops teams to implement. It is also an agile methodology best practice, as it enables software development teams to focus on meeting business requirements, code quality, and security because deployment steps are automated.
Advantage of Jenkins
1. Jenkins is an open-source tool that is extremely easy to install and use. You need no extra components to use it
2. It is free and available to be used with different platforms, such as Windows, Linux, macOS, and others
3. It is widely used, so finding support on online communities is not a big problem
4. Jenkins automates all integration work. Integration issues are scarce, and so, it helps in saving time and money over the project lifecycle.
5. 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
6. Jenkins can be configured to run CI and CD concepts properly
7. It can easily detect and fix issues. The software is always ready for a sudden release
Use Cases of Jenkins
Continuous Integration
A process of development includes various changes in the source code and in a shared repository. every commit made then builds. that helps to detect problems early in the code. Jenkins provides the build and test results to the concerned teams.
Most of the companies use Jenkins to automate the processes in the deployment of a product. Jenkins can use as a build server to execute jobs and automate test. Jenkins accelerates the software development process by automating the process. It uses plugins to achieve continuous integration of various DevOps stages.
Continuous Delivery
Jenkins helps in making changes as configurations, error fixes in production in a safe and efficient manner using short work cycles.
IBM Order Management (OMS)
Jenkins is a popular open-source Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) solution. A customer was using Jenkins to manage their front-end eCommerce development but was not using it to manage their IBM Order Management (OMS) development projects, instead, they were using Rational Team Concert (RTC) as their code repository.
As a result, they were unable to run multiple Order Management development projects simultaneously, because they didn’t have a good way to manage their codebase and deployment to different environments.
For solving this problem Bridge Solutions migrated the customer’s Order Management code base from RTC to Jenkins and enabled integration between Jenkins and Bitbucket to enable instance-level code management and build mechanism. The project was completed in 2 months, which included testing. This allowed them to have multiple code branches, not just a single branch, so they could support multiple development projects simultaneously.
BANKING SECTOR
Tymit, a revolutionary credit card processing company, leveraged Jenkins to build a compliant, transparent and secure modern DevOps platform to drive product innovation, handle instant financial transactions and support thousands of users in real-time.
Jenkins helped in faster delivery of mobile, microservices and operational services. Reduced software testing and release cycles by 50. Ability to support thousands of users for real-time transactions. Created a secure, controlled and compliant fintech environment.
MEDICAL
A global company that provides scientific instrumentation, software, and services to healthcare, life science, and other laboratories in academia, government, and biotech, and pharmaceutical industries. The aim was to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer starts with automated processes in software development.
They were facing a challenge to develop software that can help simplify DNA sequencing analysis on the fly.
Jenkins's job was to automate build image distribution. This used to be very messy due to a lack of version tracking, especially with so many duplicate copies of builds. Jenkins helped us streamline this process with single deployment, track all versions, and allow wide distribution of builds among the team for testing, verifications, etc.
Neural Networks in Railways
Neural Networks find extensive applications in areas where traditional computers don’t fare too well. For the longest time possible, the word “intelligence” was just associated with the human brain. Scientists found a way of training computers by following the methodology our brain uses. Thus came Artificial Intelligence, which can essentially be defined as intelligence originating from machines.
Netflix
Netflix is a streaming service that offers a wide variety of award-winning TV shows, movies, anime, documentaries, and more on thousands of internet-connected devices. So Netflix greatly uses Jenkins for its use case. Once a line of code has been built and tested locally using Nebula, it is ready for continuous integration and deployment. The first step is to push the updated source code to a git repository. Teams are free to find a git workflow that works for them.
Once the change is committed, a Jenkins job is triggered. Netflix’s use of Jenkins for continuous integration has evolved over the years. They started with a single massive Jenkins master in their datacenter and have evolved to running 25 Jenkins masters in AWS. Jenkins is used throughout Netflix for a variety of automation tasks above just simple continuous integration.
A Jenkins job is configured to invoke Nebula to build, test and package the application code. If the repository being built is a library, Nebula will publish the .jar to our artifact repository. If the repository is an application, then the Nebula os package plugin will be executed.
— DIvya Jain
