Cloud Native DevOps with Jenkins X
Cloud Native DevOps with JenkinsX
CloudBees sponsored this podcast.
Streamlining CI/CD in the shift to cloud native DevOps is hard — and the road can be fraught with peril. But the potential rewards are significant.
Automation is an essential part of DevOps and Jenkins is in a prime position to help streamline CI/CD processes. But Jenkins itself, while remaining essential for many organizations’ development processes, is notoriously difficult to master and manage, especially as projects are scaled. This actually spells opportunities for those who can serve as in-house Jenkins experts of sorts, but such a specialty, in many ways, goes against the spirit of DevOps.
As we enter the world of cloud native, extending Jenkins to new platforms, as well as honing CI/CD processes that may have worked reasonably well for monolithic deployments in the past, adds yet another technical challenge.
As a metaphor for what is at stake, CloudBees has coined the term “Jenkinsteins” to describe the end result of the struggles organizations face when attempting to get a handle on Jenkins’ unwieldiness.
CloudBees’ Jenkins X tool was designed to make such metaphors a thing of the past. Developed one year ago, it helps standardize how to integrate CI and CD with the de facto cloud native platform, Kubernetes. The idea is also to allow organizations to use their own source code while Jenkins X automates the process as it is ported to cloud native environments.
“Installing and managing Jenkins and configuring Jenkins and figuring out how to create your pipelines and which plugins to use and how to even do CI and CD, take a reasonable amount of effort,” James Strachan, senior architect at CloudBees and the project lead on Jenkins X, said. “What we wanted to do with Jenkins X was go the other way around and basically make CI and CD almost an appliance you just consume.”
As part of “The New Stack Guide to Cloud Native DevOps” ebook and podcast series, some of CloudBees’ key team members discussed how Jenkins X, CI/CD and DevOps all elegantly fit together. On hand to share their views along with Strachan were Michael Neale, co-founder and engineering manager of CloudBees and James Rawlings, principal software engineer at CloudBees.
In many ways, Jenkins X is becoming an orchestrator of Jenkins, Strachan said. “We wanted to standardize how to do CI and CD and Kubernetes, with Jenkins X, so that you literally bring your source code along and Jenkins X automates all the rest of it,” Strachan said.
In this Edition:
2:50: Discussing the inception of Jenkins X and DevOps
7:37: Would it be possible to eliminate the distinctions between Jenkins and Jenkins X, and CloudBees part in that?
12:16: Maybe the Jenkins in-house expert will be a thing of the past?
17:01: The serverless aspect of Jenkins X and where it’s headed
23:08: What is a “Jenkinstein?”
26:30: What kind of feedback and questions are you getting (about Jenkins X)?
Feature image via Pixabay.
