DevOps World | Jenkins World 2018 Preview: Are DevOps and Jenkins Synonymous?
DevOps World + Jenkins World 2018 Preview: Are DevOps and Jenkins Synonymous?
Jenkins has often been called the “engine of DevOps,” and in recent years through the aid of plug-ins, the hub for a continuous delivery pipeline. It’s explained as an automation tool, and the principal software component around which an organization’s DevOps strategy may be based.
Yet at its core, Jenkins is essentially an automation server. Its extensive use by IT professionals for data center automation and infrastructure management is significantly under-reported. Indeed, from the perspective of many data center managers, Jenkins is a movement that they started, and whose uptake by software developers is on account of their persistence.
So Jenkins should be something these two departments of IT have in common with one another. Is the extension of the annual Jenkins World conference into DevOps World an indication that these groups may finally be seeing eye-to-eye — and in the same conference hall?
“Jenkins is no longer just a general automation server or a CI server,” remarked Brian Dawson, DevOps evangelist for CloudBees — the producer of commercial Jenkins, as well as a recent cloud-native platform built around Jenkins called CloudBees Core. “Rather, Jenkins has become an important part of enabling organizations and teams to implement DevOps.
“Now, we recognize that Jenkins is not the ‘everything’ of DevOps, Dawson continued. “There are a lot of other aspects of DevOps that are not codified into Jenkins as a tool alone. So by extending the show from Jenkins World to also be DevOps World, it gives us room to bring in speakers and content to not just speak to Jenkins as a DevOps solution, but speak to the overall process of DevOps transformation above and beyond just Jenkins.”
What has happened in the past four years’ time is that Jenkins has become the center of a kind of DevOps ecosystem. Platforms and processes have been built around Jenkins that adapt to, or implement, versions of DevOps techniques that pertain, to one degree or another, to various organizations. These tools have been presenting themselves as “end-to-end DevOps” — which does assume that DevOps is linear and has two ends.
Thing is, as some of the session tracks at this year’s conference in San Francisco illustrate, other stakeholders in the process, such as security and marketing, end up stretching DevOps in different dimensions, leaving it less linear and one-dimensional as some add-on platform makers may have originally envisioned.
Listen now to Brian Dawson and his CloudBees colleagues, R. Tyler Croy and Ben Williams, in this discussion previewing DevOps World / Jenkins World 2018 (taking place Sept. 16 – 18 in San Francisco this year) on The New Stack Makers podcast.
In this Edition:
2:37: How would you say the sessions at DevOpsWorld reflect the growth of DevOps as a whole?
6:06: Is there a difference between the take-up of DevOps concept in organizations in Europe versus in North America?
10:09: Exploring CloudBees Core.
13:14: What more can someone with a security interest go to gain more knowledge at DevOpsWorld?
15:39: What tracks to explore at DevOpsWorld for implementing Jenkins in a CI/CD environment.
19:44: Where can one go to sign up for DevOpsWorld?
CloudBees is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.
