INDUSTRY USE CASES OF JENKINS

In 2021, When industries are running towards automation, adopting different DevOps tools to solve their industrial use-cases. In this race, Jenkins is one the most promising tool. These automation tools not only automate the thing but also help in reducing the cost.

In this article, we are going to discuss the following things:

• What is Jenkins?
• What is Jenkins used for?
• How does it work?
• Advantage of Jenkins.
• At least one use case of Jenkins.

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins — an open-source automation server that enables developers around the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software.

Jenkins is written in Java with plugins built for Continuous Integration purposes. Jenkins is used to building and testing 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.

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. Let’s understand what is Continuous Integration(CI) and Continuous Delivery(CD) first.

Continuous Integration(CI)

In development practice, while developing any software developers need to program and test their code. There are many developers working on the same project over an SCM tool. They need an environment where they can test it quickly. As fast as they test, they can detect the error and solve that quickly. Using continuous integration tools all things become automate and as the code is pushed the testing begins.

Jenkins achieves Continuous Integration with the help of plugins. The plugin provides the ability to integrate with various DevOps stages.

Continuous Delivery(CD)

In DevOps, when you make changes to your product, such as modifying configuration or adding new features quickly and safely by keeping the code in a deployable state all the time, we call it Continuous Delivery.

Continuous Delivery makes deployments routine affairs. The deployments could be of an embedded system or an extensively distributed system. In this process, the changes in your code get automatically prepared, tested, and built. You do so by removing the hardening, testing, and integration phases that are usually present in ‘dev complete.’

How does Jenkins work?

Jenkins is a Continuous Integration tool. In the development process a number of different tasks including unique functionality in the repository, feature development, and bug fixes. Jenkins is useful in identifying the issue and fix it quickly.

Continuous integration has come from a programming model that is associated with the Agile methodology. However, the concept can still be applied to all those programming models that are iterative in nature.

CI often works in tandem with continuous delivery (CD) to deliver executable code to production at a much faster pace and in an automated way. Listed below are common CI practices:

1. Regular code committing
2. Build staging
3. A build machine dedicated to the integration
4. Continuous feedback
5. Developer test categorization

Continuous Integration can be released at whatever frequency organization you deem appropriate considering your project and company. That is the reason the which uses CI have more regular releases than those that use traditional software development processes.

Advantage of Jenkins

• Jenkins is an open-source tool that is extremely easy to install and use.
• It is free and available for all the platforms like Windows, macOS, Linux, and others.
• It has great community support
• It has 1000+ plugins to ease your work.
• You can also code the plugin and provide that to the community.
• It is build using Java hence it is portable with all the major platforms.
• Due to CI/CD, it detects errors quickly and that saves the time of developer as well.

Even the minutest of change in the code could give rise to a new build. That is the reason many industry are using it.

Case Study of Topdanmark

Delivering tools and infrastructure to drive innovation

Since the company relies heavily on IT-infrastructure, it is imperative that every bit just works.

With roughly 400 IT-related employees in the company and just about 80 on the operations team, the rest of the developers support approximately 2,000 other employees. Within the Ops group, There are six-man DevTools team who maintain the server platform that runs most of the company’s client/customer-related business applications. They keep approximately 1,000 servers alive. The servers are put into different categories, depending on which environment they live in.

Building automation with a highly-configurable Jenkins platform

Most of Topdanmark’s servers and all their desktops are virtualized, so they are easy to replace if something breaks down. In terms of Jenkins installations, they are all virtual.

Topdanmark has two Jenkins setups, legacy and CI/CD. In legacy setup, They have test, integration, release, and production environments. In CI/CD setup, they have a non-production and a production environment.

The legacy setup is part of a pre-scheduled handheld deployment cycle, customized to whichever team uses it. Due to all the customizations, it could take several days from the developer request to having a working Jenkins instance. This is ofcourse take several time but using CI/CD will make it easy and fast.

The new setup is automated and easier to maintain. For this new iteration, the team took a different, more modern approach to deliver the service to its users. They created a self-service portal that allows anyone within the company to ‘order’ a Jenkins instance, a huge timesaver.

Driving developer success with automation and responsiveness

Due to the very nature of development and a constant flow of business needs, it’s imperative for organizations to support developers by supplying tools and solutions that allow them to create the software needed to solve the task at hand.

The secret behind this is that all the new Jenkins instances are based on spinning up a custom Jenkins Docker image, bootstrapping some multi-branch configuration — like predefined plugins — and creating the multi branch repositories from one or more GitHub organizations that are part of the request-form.

To simplify the user experience even further, Topdanmark created quite a few Groovy scripts that can be used in the Jenkinsfiles. They basically hide all the complicated stuff but maintain control regarding internal audits, and other corporate rules.

Evolving tools, evolving applications

With the help of Jenkins, Topdanmark keeps tooling up to date. They are in continuous dialogue with the developers regarding what they want and need to do their job. By continuously evolving the tools, they better support them as they continue to evolve their applications.

In Jon’s Jenkins Is The Way user story, he cites several results due to his team’s use of Jenkins. These include 100% automation of Jenkins instances and the ability to release and deploy an artifact whenever, wherever. However, the ultimate outcome is one that Topdanmark — and Jon — is proudest of: happy software developers, developing great software.

Topdenmark:

Topdanmark, a Danish insurance company offering a customer service platform that allows clients to easily and quickly manage their insurance, investments and pensions.

Final Words

Jenkins is a very advance tool of DevOps that is making things extremely easy and fast. Using this tool industries are really making their technology better and could be able to provide their service better.