DevOps

A simple overview of Jenkins

What is jenkins ??

  • Jenkins is an open-source automation tool written in Java with plugins built for Continuous Integration purposes.
  • It is used to build and test your software projects continuously making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build.
  • It also allows you to continuously deliver your software by integrating with a large number of testing and deployment technologies.
  • With Jenkins, organizations can accelerate the software development process through automation.
  • Jenkins integrates development life-cycle processes of all kinds, including build, document, test, package, stage, deploy, static analysis, and much more.
  • Jenkins achieves Continuous Integration with the help of plugins.
  • Plugins allow the integration of Various DevOps stages.
  • If you want to integrate a particular tool, you need to install the plugins for that tool. For example Git, Maven 2 project, Amazon EC2, HTML publisher etc.

Top 10 Jenkins plugins

  1. Kubernetes– The Kubernetes plugin is great for automating build agents on a Kubernetes cluster.
  2. Swarm – It helps make life easier by allowing you to add worker nodes to a Jenkins master node effectively creating a cluster
  3. Amazon elastic container service – A plugin that deploys build agents to an existing Amazon ECS cluste
  4. Azure container service – Azure Container Services is being deprecated by Microsoft, but this plugin still supports it as well as Azure Kubernetes Service.
  5. Jira – Jira is an open source plugin that does exactly what it says. Once installed, you can integrate your Jenkins instance with Atlassian Jira Software.
  6. Pipeline – Pipeline is actually a group of plugins that are used for creating continuous integration pipelines.
  7. Metrics – The Metrics plugin uses the Dropwizard Metrics API to conduct standard health checks and gather standard metrics on plugins installed on your Jenkins instance.
  8. Mailer – Once configured and added to the Post-Build action of the Jenkins job, the “Mailer” plugin will send you emails based on the job results.
  9. Git – The Git plugin allows jobs to connect to remote repositories and run git operations against them.
  10. Scm API – SCM API is a plugin that integrates with source control management systems.