Industry Use Cases of Jenkins

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is a DevOps automation tool . It’s an open source CI/CD server that allows you to automate the different stages of our delivery pipeline. Currently, it offers more than 1,000 plugins, so it integrates with almost all DevOps tools, from Docker to Puppet.

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.

A dispute between Oracle (which had acquired Sun) and the independent Hudson open source community led to a fork with a name change Jenkins.

How it works?

Let’s understand with an example

When the developers push code to Git repository, with the help of triggers or scheduling techniques , the changes in code are detected by Jenkins server.

Jenkins pulls the updated code and starts the build process and if build is not successful , it gives feedback to the developers otherwise the application is deployed on production server. This all process is automated, only developer has to push the code.

Every commit made in the source code is built and tested. So, instead of checking the entire source code developers only need to focus on a particular commit. This leads to frequent new software releases.

How industries are using Jenkins?

Gainsight

> What problem they were facing?

To 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.

> The Solution

Jenkins provided 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.

> The Results

1.infrastructure costs reduced by 40%

2. builds are 30% faster

3. better and seamless communication on builds and releases

4. 95% of infrastructure scalable with code

5. virtually no more manual processes