This article is based on reporting originally published by theserverside.com and covers announcements made around the Jenkins World conference in late August 2017.
A Wave of New Services for the Jenkins Ecosystem
The Jenkins DevOps ecosystem gained several notable additions in late 2017, spanning free advisory tooling, certified managed service providers (MSPs), interactive application security testing, and database release automation. Together, these announcements reflected a maturing continuous delivery landscape where organizations were looking beyond the Jenkins core for production-grade support, security, and broader pipeline coverage.
CloudBees Jenkins Advisor: Free Proactive Health Checks
CloudBees announced CloudBees Jenkins Advisor, a free service designed to analyze a Jenkins continuous delivery environment and surface actionable recommendations. The tool draws on CloudBees’s accumulated knowledge base to identify configuration issues, plugin conflicts, performance bottlenecks, and other conditions that could affect software delivery uptime or reliability.
Rather than waiting for an outage or degraded build performance to prompt investigation, Jenkins Advisor takes a proactive stance: administrators connect their instance, and the service returns a prioritized list of potential problems along with suggested corrective actions.
“We want to ensure that developers get the best, smoothest experience out of Jenkins. Outages, performance issues and other problems can hurt people’s confidence in software delivery automation. With CloudBees Jenkins Advisor, we can proactively identify potential issues for our users in Jenkins, administrators can nip problems in the bud and everyone can focus on other, more important things.”
— Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Jenkins founder and CTO, CloudBees
The announcement was made at the Jenkins World conference held at the end of August 2017 in San Francisco.
DevOps Managed Services: Certified MSP Partners for Jenkins Enterprise
Alongside the advisory tool, CloudBees launched its DevOps Managed Services program, enabling a certified group of managed service providers to deliver CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise — the company’s enterprise-grade Jenkins distribution — as a fully managed offering. CloudBees provides technical expertise and round-the-clock support behind each certified partner.
The initial cohort of certified MSPs included:
- CloudHesive
- Digital OnUs
- iTMethods
- Microland
- TriNimbus
This model lets organizations that lack in-house Jenkins expertise — or that want to offload operational overhead — consume a production-grade CI/CD platform without building specialist knowledge internally.
Accenture: Scaling Jenkins to 25,000 Users
Accenture offered a concrete illustration of enterprise-scale Jenkins adoption. Stas Zvinyatskovsky, managing director of modern engineering at Accenture, explained that the company had standardized on Jenkins after beginning its DevOps journey roughly 15 years earlier by centralizing build-and-release infrastructure. At Accenture’s scale — more than 400,000 employees and 25,000 active Jenkins users — consistency and repeatability became the dominant challenges.
“We have 400,000-plus employees and 25,000 unique users on our infrastructure, and they have their unique needs. We solve that by running CloudBees at the core as the engine. We also have our own Accenture DevOps platform, ADOP [Accenture DevOps Platform], that allows us to repeatedly and reliably deploy continuous delivery pipelines from team to team with best practices codified in those pipelines.”
— Stas Zvinyatskovsky, Managing Director of Modern Engineering, Accenture
DevOps Security Testing: Checkmarx CxIAST and the Broader AppSec Platform
Application security company Checkmarx introduced a new release of its CxIAST (Interactive Application Security Testing) product, designed to slot into continuous delivery pipelines without slowing release cadence. CxIAST performs security testing in real time as the application runs, rather than as a separate, blocking phase in the pipeline.
CxIAST is part of a broader Checkmarx application security platform that includes:
- CxSAST — Static Application Security Testing, for scanning source code before execution.
- CxOSA — Open Source Analysis, for identifying vulnerabilities in third-party and open source dependencies.
- Codebashing — An in-context secure coding training platform aimed at developers.
Maty Siman, CTO and founder of Checkmarx, described the platform’s design principle as correlating data across all four products throughout the software development lifecycle, using that aggregated context to produce faster and more actionable security findings than any single tool could generate in isolation.
From a DevOps pipeline perspective, combining SAST (shift-left, early in development), IAST (runtime, in staging or test), and OSA (dependency scanning) gives teams layered coverage without requiring developers to context-switch into a separate security workflow.
DevOps to the Database: Datical’s Jenkins Plugin
One of the historically difficult gaps in continuous delivery pipelines is the database tier. Application code can be versioned, tested, and deployed automatically, but database schema changes have traditionally required manual scripting, coordination with DBAs, and release gates that break pipeline velocity. Datical, a database release automation vendor, addressed this directly with a Jenkins plugin.
The Datical DB plugin for Jenkins exposes Datical DB’s database release automation capabilities inside the Jenkins UI and Jenkins Pipeline, eliminating the need to write custom scripts or invoke command-line tools manually. Teams can include database changes in the same pipeline that deploys application changes, applying the same CI/CD principles — version control, automated testing, rollback capability — to the database layer.
Pete Pickerill, VP of product strategy and co-founder of Datical, summarized the intent: the plugin allows development teams to manage database releases the same way they already manage application releases.
Kohsuke Kawaguchi of CloudBees acknowledged the significance of the integration:
“It’s great to see Datical integrating their technology with Jenkins Pipeline to give Jenkins users the tools to solve one of the harder problems in continuous delivery.”
— Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Jenkins founder and CTO, CloudBees
What These Announcements Mean for Jenkins Practitioners
Taken together, the announcements from Jenkins World 2017 reflect several trends relevant to DevOps engineers and platform teams:
- Operational confidence at scale: Free tools like Jenkins Advisor lower the barrier to identifying misconfigurations before they cause incidents, which is particularly valuable for teams running large or complex Jenkins environments.
- Managed services reduce operational burden: The certified MSP program acknowledges that not every organization wants to run Jenkins infrastructure in-house, and that enterprise support and SLAs matter at scale.
- Security shifting into the pipeline: Products like CxIAST represent a move toward embedding security feedback directly into the delivery loop rather than running security as a separate, post-development gate.
- Closing the database gap: Database automation remains one of the last manual hand-offs in many pipelines; plugins like Datical’s bring schema changes under the same automation and auditability as application deployments.
For teams evaluating their Jenkins strategy, each of these tools addresses a distinct operational or compliance gap that often emerges as CI/CD adoption matures beyond the initial pilot phase.