Industry Use Cases of Jenkins

In many projects, the product development workflow has three main concerns: building, testing, and deployment. Each change to the code means something could accidentally go wrong, so in order to prevent this from happening developers adopt many strategies to diminish incidents and bugs. Jenkins, and other continuous integration tools (CI) are used together with a source version software (such as GIT) to test and quickly evaluate the updated code.

About Jenkins

Jenkins is a popular self-contained, open-source automation server to perform continuous integration and build automation. Its elementary functionality is executing a predefined list of phases or jobs. In other words, every change in a repository triggers a pipeline of jobs that evaluates and executes different tasks to accomplish what has been previously defined.

Each phase is monitored and allows you to stop the entire process and the change will be reported to the user by Jenkins. In large companies, it is common for multiple teams to work on the same project without knowing what the other teams are doing on the same code base. Those changes can create bugs that will only be revealed when both codes are integrated into the same branch. Since Jenkins can run its predefined jobs for every commit, it will be able to detect and notify developers that something is not right and where it is.

Thousands of add-ons can be integrated with Jenkins, they provide support for different types of build, version control systems, automation, and more. It can be installed through native system packages, Docker, or be run by any machine with a Java environment installed.

Jenkins is often used for building projects; running tests to spot bugs, to analyze static code, and deployment. It also executes repetitive tasks, saves time, and optimizes developing processes.

Beginning with the second version, Jenkins introduced Pipelines, a different way to programmatically define a project build workflow. Before pipelines, the CI description was defined and stored outside the repository — it was designed to evaluate — now, with Pipelines, CI files are present in project source code. The file describes the workflow through a language which can be used to create different jobs in sequence or in parallel.

Some of the possible steps that can be performed using Jenkins are:

• Software build using build systems such as Gradle, Maven, and more.
• Automation testing using test frameworks such as Nose2, PyTest, Robot, Selenium, and more.
• Execute test scripts (using Windows terminal, Linux shell, etc.
• Achieve test results and perform post actions such as printing test reports, and more.
• Execute test scenarios against different input combinations for obtaining improved test coverage.
• Continuous Integration (CI) where the artifacts are automatically created and tested. This aids in identification of issues in the product at an early stage of development.

At the time of what is Jenkins blog, it had close to 1500+ plugins contributed by the community. Plugins help in customizing the experience with Jenkins, along with providing support for accelerating activities related to building, deploying, and automating a project.

Jenkins use cases

Let’s take a look at some of the main scenarios Jenkins plays a critical part in.

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. In that way, it is possible to isolate problems, solving them faster and provide higher-quality products.

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. All of the code progress and changes are delivered in a nonstop way with high quality and low risks. The end result is one or more artifacts that can be deployed to production.

Continuous Deployment (CD)

Continuous deployment, also known as continuous implementation, is an advanced stage of continuous delivery that the automation process does not end at the delivery stage. In this methodology, every change that is validated at the automatic testing stage is later implemented at the production stage.

The fail fast strategy is always of the utmost importance when deploying to production. Since every change is deployed to production, it is possible to identify edge cases and unexpected behaviors that would be very hard to identify with automated tests. To fully take advantage of continuous deployment, it is important to have solid logging technology that allows you to identify the increasing error count on newer versions. In addition, a trustworthy orchestration technology like Kubernetes that will allow the new version to slowly be deployed to users until the full rollout or an incident is detected and the version is canceled.

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).

Industries using Jenkins

D4Science

Amping up scientific research with CI/CD powered by Jenkins

To promote open science practices and support scientific communities while serving 11k registered users in 45 countries, D4Science introduced a new delivery pipeline that replaced their pre-existing build platform.

Of course, they had to build and release their software framework (gCube) in a way that would support multi-project releases at scale — from 200+ Git repositories within the same day! It had to be fast, automate all release activities, and it had to deliver incremental releases to address user requirements quickly. Most of all, the solution had to be cost-effective.

Using Jenkins, they created an innovative approach to software delivery: a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, scalable, easy to maintain, and upgradable at a minimal cost.

Discover how D4Science empowers e-Science and virtual research communities with software released via Jenkins. Read the Jenkins case study featuring D4Science here!

Gainsight

Humanizing CSX with tech innovation and a robust DevSecOps platform

Gainsight’s customer service experience platform helps customer success teams at more than 100 leading IT and healthcare clients. How? By driving engagement for tens of thousands of their customers.

That’s why the engineering team at Gainsight approached the customer experience by building a smarter, faster DevSecOps platform using Jenkins. They stuck to an infrastructure-as-code approach while integrating various tools and programming languages all within the platform. And they secured processes with better visibility and air-tight quality control.

The result was a flexible DevSecOps infrastructure, 95% of which is scalable with code. And the cost of infrastructure costs was 40% less. That provides Gainsight with ease of collaboration, keener operational insight, and — because builds are 30% faster — the ability to stay a step ahead of the competition.

Avoris Travel

Reinventing travel with an inventive technology platform

Part of Barceló Group, Ávoris Travel is behind prominent destination travel brands like LeSki, Le Musik, and a selection of author travels under its “Viagens Com Assinatura” signature travel concept. A proprietary database and a smart, dynamic booking engine are the tickets to offering differentiating and inventive travel opportunities.

Also unique to Avoris is a discreet machining technology that enables agents to enter specific criteria to search and find all types of trips and travel opportunities across the entire network.

“Our infrastructure is very important because we have to be online to meet customer demand anywhere in the world,” said Alejandro Alvarez Vazquez, Sysadmin, Avoris Travel. “Our CI/CD platform is used by 200 people. The services that we build and deploy are used by thousands of potential clients and by our network of 675 own agencies located in Spain and Portugal.”

Jenkins plugins helped Avoris reduce build times by over 50% and became a go-to, scalable infrastructure supporting 675 agencies and over 2.8 million international consumers.