Open source cross-platform Jenkins is becoming very popular among developers. Written in Java, Jenkins software was initially released on February 2, 2011 and recently had its stable release on February 24, 2016.
Hundreds of Plugins in the Update Center is one of the main reasons why Jenkins is becoming the engine of developers. “The community sees Jenkins as an orchestration and automation engine ... I think the reason why Jenkins has become the de facto engine is because it’s extremely pluggable,” CloudBees CEO Sasha Labourey said for InforWorld. But plug-ins are not the only reason behind Jenkins’ success.
Besides being a very easy platform to work with, according to Jenkins official site, as an extensible automation server the software can be used as a simple CI server or turned into the continuous delivery hub for any kind of project.
As a self-contained Java-based program, Jenkins is also easy to set up and install and features various operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X. etc. Providing almost unlimited opportunities for developers, Jenkins can be extended via its plugin architecture and can distribute work across multiple machines in an easy and quick way.
“Jenkins has become the open source standard for managing the dev side of devops, from source code management to delivering code to production. An ecosystem of more than 1,100 plug-ins has emerged, enabling customers to add all sorts of functionality and integrate Jenkins with everything from Active Directory to GitHub to the OpenShift PaaS,” according to InfoWorld.
Since cloud is gaining more and more popularity lately, as a cloud service Jenkins is offering most developers what they want, making their job easier and saving them a lot of time as well. In an interview with InfoWorld Labourey gave an example of how Jenkins as a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) solution enables developers to automate the process to deployment:
“Say a company is using Chef or Puppet to deploy on AWS. Jenkins is not going to replace that. Jenkins is going to be calling Puppet to do it -- OK, here are the bits, so let’s call this Puppet script and see how it works. And the output of Puppet’s execution is going to matter to Jenkins because it might decide to unroll the deployment and take further actions. We call it “the pipeline.” It’s really this series of steps. It could be five steps, or it could be 50 steps.”
Jenkins 2.0, which was recently launched, has a built-in support for delivery pipelines, improved usability and it is fully backwards compatible. If you want to check it out by yourself, and download it, you can do so here.