✨Jenkins: Industry Use Cases✨

Jenkins

Jenkins can be termed as an automation tool that is used by DevOps teams looking to bring continuous integration into their projects. It is open-source software that is built in Java. It is used through the lifecycle of software development.

Jenkins is often used to build projects, running tests to spot bugs, analyze static code, and deploy. It also executes repetitive tasks, saves time, and optimizes developing processes.

✔ Jenkins Architecture :

✔ Jenkin History :

• Kohsuke Kawaguchi, a Java developer working at SUN Microsystems, was tired of building the code and fixing errors repetitively. In 2004, created an automation server called Hudson that automates build and test tasks.
• In 2011, Oracle, who owned Sun Microsystems, had a dispute with Hudson's open source community, so they forked Hudson and renamed it, Jenkins.
• Both Hudson and Jenkins continued to operate independently. But in a short period, Jenkins acquired many projects and contributors while Hudson remained with only 32 projects. With time, Jenkins became more popular, and Hudson was not maintained anymore.

✔ Jenkins Use Cases :

Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous integration is a practice that forces developers to integrate their code into a central repository frequently. Instead of building out new features without any quality measurement, every change is tested against the central repository 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, and experiments — into production safely and efficiently using short work cycles.

The main goal is 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.

Automation

As a job executor, Jenkins can be used to automate repetitive tasks like backup/restore databases, turn on or turn off machines, collect statistics about a service, and other charges. Since every job can be scheduled, repetitive tasks can have a desired time interval (like once a day, once a week, every fifth day of the month, and so forth).

✔ Jenkins Pipeline :

A Jenkins pipeline is a combination of jobs, tasks, or events that are connected to each other in a sequence. In other words, it is a group of plugins that enable continuous delivery pipelines to be easily integrated and implemented. Extendable automation works to support a pipeline in creating both complex and straightforward delivery pipelines in the form of code and with the help of domain-specific language or DSL.

✔ Companies using Jenkins :

We have data on 59,079 companies that use Jenkins. The companies using Jenkins are most often found in the United States and the Computer Software industry. Companies most often use Jenkins with 10–50 employees and 1M-10M dollars in revenue. Our data for Jenkins usage goes back as far as five years and one month.

Case Study: Avoris Travel

Reinventing travel with an inventive technology platform

Challenge:

With over 200 developers relying on its infrastructure, they needed a secure, easily customizable, and powerful CI/CD platform.

Solution:

Avoris Travel, a unique travel company seeking to reinvent the travel industry, relies on an equally inventive technology platform fueled by Jenkins.

Results:

• reduced build times over 50% with the flexibility of Jenkins plugins
• increased the speed of delivery with Jenkins Pipelines
• Much less problematic and simple deployments for the team
• scalable infrastructure supporting 675 agencies and over 2.8 million international consumers

Case Study: Tymit

Challenge:

Create a solidly reliable CI/CD platform that provides the technology team with the agility and the flexibility needed to innovate while ensuring the security and scalability their fintech service requires.

Solution:

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.

Results:

• 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.

Jenkins-github

Case Study: 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 constructed is a library, Nebula will publish the .jar to our artifact repository. If the storage is an application, then the Nebula os package plugin will be executed.

How famous is Jenkins?

Two thousand eight hundred thirty-three companies reportedly use Jenkins in their tech stacks, including Facebook, Netflix, and Udemy.

Here is the name of the companies which use Jenkins:

• Facebook
• Netflix
• Udemy
• Instead
• Robinhood
• Twitch
• Lyft
• Delivery Hero
• LinkedIn

Jenkins Release Cycle

Like other open-source projects, Jenkins also produces two release lines — LTS (Long-Term Support) and Weekly (regular) releases. Jenkins is very good with releases, as stable releases happen every four weeks.

Connect me on my LinkedIn as well.