JENKINS- AN AUTOMATION BUILDER

9 min readMar 20, 2021

Bonjour! Technical people I welcome you with a blog which actually will tell about the Automation Builder. Why Automation Builder? It is because it can be integrated to almost all the setups or pipelines in the world. One has just to setup for one time with Jenkins and can forget about the same. Because Jenkins has a capability to do the things at the time required and is designed with an Intelligence of understanding the things , perform accordingly and moreover without delay. Here I am going to tell about the Jenkins, its use cases and how big Companies are benefited by this great and Intelligent Tool.

So, lets start !! But first let us know something about DevOps and its Life cycle.

What is DevOps ?

DevOps is a term for a group of concepts that, while not all new, have catalyzed into a movement and are rapidly spreading throughout the technical community. Like any new and popular term, people may have confused and sometimes contradictory impressions of what it is. Here’s my take on how DevOps can be usefully defined; I propose this definition as a standard framework to more clearly discuss the various areas DevOps covers. Like “Quality” or “Agile,” DevOps is a large enough concept that it requires some nuance to fully understand.

Life Cycle of DevOps

DevOps is primarily implemented in application development for e-commerce websites, cloud-native applications, and other large distributed platforms. It consists of multiple phases that collectively become the DevOps lifecycle.

There are seven phases are the main constituents that ensure DevOps optimizes all development processes, right from proposal to production and the complete delivery.

1. Continuous Development

This is a first phase of the cycle which includes the process of Planning. Planning doesn’t includes the great tools but it only requires the plans which arranges and ranges the tools in a particular way to move in a way to the accomplishment of the project. Developing the source code for application begins by choosing from the different programming languages. JavaScript, C/C++, Ruby, and Python are prominently used for coding applications in DevOps.

2. Continuous Integration

This is second phase of the cycle which includes the source code gets modified several times, and these frequent changes happen on a weekly or a daily basis. Code integration, the next phase, is the core of the entire DevOps lifecycle. In continuous integration, new codes that support add-on functionalities are built and integrated into the existing code. Bugs in the source code are detected early on.

3. Continuous Testing

This is the third phase of the lifecycle which is very similar to the Continuous Integration. Some developers often thinks this step is equivalent to the Continuous Integration phase. Here, the developed software is continuously tested for bugs. A test environment is simulated with the use of Docker containers. Through automated testing, developers save effort and time, usually lost in manual testing. Reports generated by automated testing improve the test evaluation process.

4. Continuous Feedback

Continuous testing and continuous integration are the two crucial phases that ensure consistent improvements in the application code. Continuous feedback is a peculiar phase where these improvements are analyzed. Developers can gauge the outcome of these modifications on the final product. Most importantly, customers who tested these applications can share their experiences in this phase. In a majority of cases, this phase of the DevOps lifecycle provides a turning point to the application development process.

5. Continuous Monitoring

Continuous monitoring helps in sustaining the availability of services in the application. It also determines the threats and root causes of recurring system errors. Security issues get resolved and problems are automatically detected and fixed. Compared to the software development teams, the IT operations teams are more involved in this phase. Their role is pivotal in supervising user activity, checking the system for unusual behavior, and tracing the presence of bugs. Sensu, ELK Stack, NewRelic, Splunk and Nagios are the key DevOps tools used in continuous monitoring. These tools enable complete control in overseeing the performance of the system, the production server, and the application.

6. Continuous Deployment

In this phase, the finalized application code is deployed to the production servers. Configuration Management is a key process in this phase, and it carries out the precise deployment of application code on all servers. Consistency in the application’s performance and functional conditions is established and curated. Code is released to the servers, updates are scheduled for all servers, and these configurations are kept consistent throughout the production process. Ansible, Puppet, and Chef are some of the effective DevOps tools used for Configuration Management, where they frequently execute the quick and continuous deployment of new code.

7. Continuous Operations

The last phase of the DevOps lifecycle is the shortest phase and the least complicated one. The purpose of continuous operation is to automate the process of releasing the application and the subsequent updates. Development cycles in continuous operations are shorter, allowing developers to ongoingly accelerate the time-to-market for the application.

Deliverables Of The Life Cycle

Every phase in the DevOps lifecycle is governed by two common factors — maximum automation and continuity. Extra steps are replaced with multi-purpose tools and the time taken to detect faults is reduced significantly. DevOps runs on a lifecycle that offers nothing less than the best version of the software application.

The end-product enables businesses to revive the speed of rampant development and improve user experiences simultaneously.
Cost control is streamlined with a high ROI (Returns on Investment). Development and operations teams can co-work organically.
Integrated with continuous deployment solutions, shipping the programmed code to over a thousand production servers is feasible. In the DevOps lifecycle, there are advanced patterns designed for deployments. Similar features are used for delivering on-demand deployment and auditing.
With endless innovations in technology, DevOps continues to evolve at maximum quality and speed. It is now a strategic part of digital transformation journeys for millions of companies around the world.
The lifecycle clearly breaks down the barriers to teamwork. There is no need for supplicating work when you can build responsible business environments with DevOps.

What Is Jenkins?

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.

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 achieves Continuous Integration with the help of plugins. Plugins allow the integration of Various DevOps stages. If you want to integrate a particular tool, you need to install the plugins for that tool. For example Git, Maven 2 project, Amazon EC2, HTML publisher etc.

History Of Jenkins

In 2004, Kohsuke Kawaguchi was a Java developer at Sun. Kawaguchi became tired of breaking builds in his development work and wanted to find a way to know, before committing code to the repository, whether the code was going to work. So Kawaguchi built an automation server in and for Java to make that possible, called Hudson. Hudson became popular at Sun, and spread to other companies as open source.

Fast-forward to 2011, and a dispute between Oracle (which had acquired Sun) and the independent Hudson open source community led to a fork with a name change, Jenkins. In 2014 Kawaguchi became CTO of Cloud Bees, which offers Jenkins-based continuous delivery products.

Both forks continued to exist, although Jenkins was much more active. Today, the Jenkins project is still active. The Hudson website was closed down on Jan 31, 2020.

In March 2019 the Linux Foundation, along with Cloud Bees, Google, and a number of other companies, launched a new open source software foundation called the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Jenkins contributors decided that their project should join this new foundation. Kawaguchi wrote at the time that nothing of significance would change for users.

Use Cases Of Jenkins

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 tasks. 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).

COMPANY’s USE CASES SOLVED BY JENKINS

1. Jenkins for OMS Code Branch Management

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 project simultaneously, because they didn’t have a good way to manage their code base, and deployment to different environments.

Solution

Bridge Solutions migrated the customer’s Order Management code base from RTC to Jenkins, and enabled integration between Jenkins and Bitbucket to enable an 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.

Key Benefits

The Jenkins platform will enable the retailer to have multiple branches of code base and do parallel development on multiple projects. This will ease and reduce risk in builds in different environments.
The customer was able to decommission RTC, and save money.
The ability to respond to build issues early. Jenkins sends emails to specified recipients whenever a certain important event occurs, such as:

Failed build
Unstable build
Successful build after a failed build, indicating that a crisis is over
Unstable build after a successful one, indicating that there’s a regression issue.

2. JENKINS FOR CI/CD PIPELINE

Challenge

Balancing the needs of DevOps modernization and cloud migration while maintaining legacy systems.

Solution

A highly-configurable CI/CD platform which allows for automation and ease of development.

Results

100% automatic creation of Jenkins instances
the ability to release and deploy an artifact whenever, wherever
software developers focused on developing software rather than operations
smaller monoliths and containerization

3. JENKINS FOR INFRASTRUCTURE

CHALLENGE

Maintain an infrastructure-as-code approach while integrating various tools and programming languages within the platform, all while securing processes with better visibility and air-tight quality control.

SOLUTION

A flexible and scalable DevSecOps infrastructure that provides Gainsight with keener operational insight, ease of collaboration, and the ability to accelerate releases to stay a step ahead of the competition.

RESULTS

infrastructure costs reduced by 40%.
builds are 30% faster.
better and seamless communication on builds and releases.
95% of infrastructure scalable with code.
virtually no more manual processes.

4. JENKINS FOR REMOVING HUMAN INTERVENTION