🔰Jenkins: Industry Use Cases🔰
Jenkins is an open source automation server which enables developers around the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software. It is the leading open source automation server and provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project.
Jenkins is free and is entirely written in Java. Jenkins is a widely used application around the world that has around 300k installations and growing day by day.
By using Jenkins, software companies can accelerate their software development process, as Jenkins can automate build and test at a rapid rate. Jenkins supports the complete development lifecycle of software from building, testing, documenting the software, deploying and other stages of a software development lifecycle.
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.
Jenkins 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 task.
- In 2011, Oracle who owned Sun Microsystems had a dispute with Hudson open source community, so they forked Hudson and renamed it as Jenkins.
- Both Hudson and Jenkins continued to operate independently. But in short span of time, Jenkins acquired a lot of projects and contributors while Hudson remained with only 32 projects. With time, Jenkins became more popular, and Hudson is not maintained anymore.
Features Of Jenkins
Jenkins is more functionality-driven rather than UI-driven hence, there is a learning curve involved in getting to know what is Jenkins. Here are the powerful developer-centric features offered by Jenkins:
1. Easy Installation & Configuration
Jenkins is a self-contained Java-based program, it is available for almost all the popular operating systems such as Windows, different flavors of Unix, and Mac OS.
2. Open-Source
As it is open-source, it is free for use. There is a strong involvement of the community which makes it a powerful CI/CD tool.
3. Thriving Plugin Ecosystem
The backbone of Jenkins is the community and the community members have been instrumental in the development (and testing) of close to 1500+ plugins available in the Update Center. Jenkins integrates with practically every tool in the continuous integration and continuous delivery toolchain.
4. Easy Distribution
Jenkins can easily distribute work across multiple machines, helping drive builds, tests and deployments across multiple platforms faster.
5. Easy Configuration
Jenkins can be easily set up and configured via its web interface, which includes on-the-fly error checks and built-in help.
6. Extensible
Jenkins can be extended via its plugin architecture, providing nearly infinite possibilities for what Jenkins can do.
7. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into the continuous delivery hub for any project.
Advantages of Jenkins include:
- It is open source and it is user-friendly, easy to install and does not require additional installations or components.
- It is free of cost and easy to install.
- Rich Plugin ecosystem. The extensive pool of plugins makes Jenkins flexible and allows building, deploying and automating across various platforms.
- It has 1500+ plugins to ease your work. If a plugin does not exist, you can code it and share it with the community.
- It is built with Java and hence, it is portable to all the major platforms.
Industries Using Jenkins
Case Study : Avoris Travel
Reinventing travel with an inventive technology platform
Challenge:
With over 200 developers relying on the company’s 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 built is a library, Nebula will publish the .jar to our artifact repository. If the repository is an application, then the Nebula os package plugin will be executed.
How popular is Jenkins?
2833 companies reportedly use Jenkins in their tech stacks, including Facebook, Netflix, and Udemy.
Here are the name of the companies which use Jenkins:
- Netflix
- Udemy
- Instacard
- Robinhood
- Twitch
- Lyft
- Delivery Hero
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.
