Jenkins and It’s Industry Use Cases !!

Introduction

Jenkins is an open-source automation tool written in Java with plugins built for Continuous Integration purposes. Jenkins is used to build and test your software projects continuously making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build. It also allows you to continuously deliver your software by integrating with a large number of testing and deployment technologies.

With Jenkins, organizations can accelerate the software development process through automation. Jenkins integrates development life-cycle processes of all kinds, including build, document, test, package, stage, deploy, static analysis, and much more. Jenkins offers a simple way to set up a continuous integration or continuous delivery (CI/CD) environment for almost any combination of languages and source code repositories using pipelines, as well as automating other routine development tasks. 

To operate Jenkins, pipelines are created. A pipeline is a series of steps the Jenkins server will take to perform the required tasks of the CI/CD process. These are stored in a plain text Jenkinsfile. The Jenkinsfile uses a curly bracket syntax that looks similar to JSON. Steps in the pipeline are declared as commands with parameters and encapsulated in curly brackets. The Jenkins server then reads the Jenkinsfile and executes its commands, pushing the code down the pipeline from committed source code to production runtime. A Jenkinsfile can be created through a GUI or by writing code directly.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous integration is a practice that forces developers to frequently integrate their code into a central repository. Instead of building out new features to the end without any quality measurement, every change is tested against the central repository in order to anticipate errors. Every developer commits daily to a shared mainline and every commit triggers an automated process to build and test. If building or testing fails it can be detected and fixed within minutes without compromising the whole structure, workflow, and project. In that way, it is possible to isolate problems, solving them faster and provide higher-quality products.

Continuous Delivery (CD)

Continuous delivery is the ability to make changes of all types—such as new features, configuration changes, error fixes, experiments—into production in a safe and efficient manner using short work cycles. The main goal in continuous delivery is to make deployments predictable as routine activities that can be achieved upon request. To be successful, the code needs to always be in a deployable state even when there is a scenario with lots of developers working and making changes on a daily basis. All of the code progress and changes are delivered in a nonstop way with high quality and low risks. The end result is one or more artifacts that can be deployed to production.

Continuous Deployment (CD)

Continuous deployment, also known as continuous implementation, is an advanced stage of continuous delivery that the automation process does not end at the delivery stage. In this methodology, every change that is validated at the automatic testing stage is later implemented at the production stage.

Benefits of Jenkins

• Jenkins is an open-source tool that is extremely easy to install and use. You need no extra components to use it.
• It is free and available to be used with different platforms, such as Windows, Linux, macOS, and others.
• Jenkins comes with a lot of plugins which ensure great flexibility.
• Jenkins automates all integration work. Integration issues are scarce, and so, it helps in saving time and money over the project lifecycle.
• 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.
• Jenkins can be configured to run CI and CD concepts properly.
• It can easily detect and fix issues. The software is always ready for a sudden release.
• Supports a variety of plugins, which allows better flexibility.
• It helps in detecting errors very early, thus saving developers a lot of time and hard work.

Case Study of Preply with Jenkins

Preply is an online educational platform that pairs students with private tutors remotely via online chat. It features a ranking algorithm that uses machine learning for classification and recommendation of tutors.

Preply’s DevOps team developed a platform that can scale as quickly as the software their team innovates: from expediting multiple language processing to supporting online tutors from over 185 countries to launching hundreds of releases per day to keep up with demand.

Preply uses Jenkins because they run hundreds of jobs every day, and we need to use many features that aren’t provided by other systems, or if provided, these features have stripped-down functionality.

Using Jenkins allows Preply to configure fully reproducible code and fuel a completely automated CI/CD process for all projects inside their company.

Preply’s team initially tried running Jenkins in Kubernetes. However, it wasn’t as compatible, nor did it completely address their specific requirements. To automate their platform, they needed to begin by building a more robust underlying infrastructure for Jenkins, and include Jenkins in more aspects, like configuration, jobs, and plugins.

Now implementing Jenkins plugins is a breeze to update and configure. Their team can run them locally and easily deploy them on production. And the fun part is they can play with plugins or a new Jenkins version on the local level without disrupting other services: engineers are free to innovate.

The ability to accelerate its product release schedule has also shown an improved conversion and user experience. But what they like the most is that their small DevOps team can introduce and deploy a new service in any way they want without jeopardizing the entire product. 

By eliminating manual processes with Jenkins, development became easier and freed this global online education company to focus on innovative services for both their students and tutors around the globe. 

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