Industry use cases of Jenkins

Quick overview about Jenkins….

Jenkins is an open source Continuous Integration server capable of orchestrating a chain of actions that help to achieve the Continuous Integration process (and not only) in an automated fashion.Jenkins is free and is entirely written in Java.

It is a server-based application and requires a web server like Apache Tomcat. The reason Jenkins became so popular is that of its monitoring of repeated tasks which arise during the development of a project. For example, if your team is developing a project, Jenkins will continuously test your project builds and show you the errors in early stages of your development.

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.

A Continuous Integration Pipeline is a powerful instrument that consists of a set of tools designed to host, monitor, compile and test code, or code changes

Why use Continuous Integration with Jenkins?

Features of Jenkins:

1. Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery — As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into the continuous delivery hub for any project.
2. Easy Installation — Jenkins is a self-contained Java-based program, ready to run out-of-the-box, with packages for Windows, Mac, and other Unix operating systems.
3. Easy Configuration — Jenkins can be easily set up and configured via its web interface.
4. Plugins — Hundreds of plugins are available in its marketplace to easily integrate Jenkins with any tool.
5. Extensible — It can be extended via its plugin architecture, providing nearly infinite possibilities for what Jenkins can do.
6. Distributed — It can be easily distributed across multiple machines, helping drive builds, tests and deployments across multiple platforms faster

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. 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.

3. Synchronization with Slack

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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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

7. Decrease Code Review Time

CI systems such as Jenkins and Version Control System such as Git can communicate with each other and inform the users when a merge request is suitable for merge. This is usually when all the tests are passed, and all other requirements are met. In addition to that, the difference in code coverage can also be reported in the merge request itself. This dramatically reduces the time taken to review a merge request

Conclusion

With great progress in software technologies, Companies requires development teams to produce and deliver high-quality software better and faster than their competition. Today, development teams are building scalable and efficient software delivery engines by creating repeatable processes which standardize development and its best practices. Automated testing is one such activity by which developer’s code is tested in the same standard way for every change and every cycle so that management and other users can trust that every change is well tested before it is moved to production.

Uses of Jenkins can save a lot of time for developers, improves code quality and coverage and provide management great control over software development. Thus, It is very well appreciated and a lot of companies uses it on a daily basis. It’s a great tool to learn for upcoming software developers too

Thanks for reading 🙏