Case Study: Industry use cases of Jenkins

In 2021, When industries are running towards automation, adopting different DevOps tools to solve their industrial use-cases. In this race, Jenkins is one the most promising tool. These automation tools not only automate the thing but also help in reducing the cost.

Table of Contents

• What is Jenkins?
• What is Jenkins used for?
• How does it work?
• Advantage of Jenkins.
• At least one use case of Jenkins.

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins — an open-source automation server that enables developers around the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software.

Jenkins is written in Java with plugins built for Continuous Integration purposes. Jenkins is used to building and testing 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.

jenkins doesn’t have its own intelligence, plugins are the one who makes jenkins intelligent. there are 1000 of plugins which can be used to increase the intelligence of jenkins.

What is Jenkins used for?

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are the most important part of the DevOps world and Jenkins is the most famous continuous integration and continuous delivery tool. With CI/CD, industries can accelerate their development process. Let’s understand what is Continuous Integration(CI) and Continuous Delivery(CD) first.

Continuous Integration(CI)

In development practice, while developing any software developers need to program and test their code. There are many developers working on the same project over an SCM tool. They need an environment where they can test it quickly. As fast as they test, they can detect the error and solve that quickly. Using continuous integration tools all things become automate and as the code is pushed the testing begins.

Jenkins achieves Continuous Integration with the help of plugins. The plugin provides the ability to integrate with various DevOps stages.

Continuous Delivery(CD)

In DevOps, when you make changes to your product, such as modifying configuration or adding new features quickly and safely by keeping the code in a deployable state all the time, we call it Continuous Delivery.

Continuous Delivery makes deployments routine affairs. The deployments could be of an embedded system or an extensively distributed system. In this process, the changes in your code get automatically prepared, tested, and built. You do so by removing the hardening, testing, and integration phases that are usually present in ‘dev complete.’

How does Jenkins work?

Jenkins is a Continuous Integration tool. In the development process a number of different tasks including unique functionality in the repository, feature development, and bug fixes. Jenkins is useful in identifying the issue and fix it quickly.

Continuous integration has come from a programming model that is associated with the Agile methodology. However, the concept can still be applied to all those programming models that are iterative in nature.

CI often works in tandem with continuous delivery (CD) to deliver executable code to production at a much faster pace and in an automated way. Listed below are common CI practices:

1. Regular code committing
2. Build staging
3. A build machine dedicated to the integration
4. Continuous feedback
5. Developer test categorization

Continuous Integration can be released at whatever frequency organization you deem appropriate considering your project and company. That is the reason the which uses CI have more regular releases than those that use traditional software development processes.

Advantage of Jenkins

• Jenkins is an open-source tool that is extremely easy to install and use.
• It is free and available for all the platforms like Windows, macOS, Linux, and others.
• It has great community support
• It has 1000+ plugins to ease your work.
• You can also code the plugin and provide that to the community.
• It is build using Java hence it is portable with all the major platforms.
• Due to CI/CD, it detects errors quickly and that saves the time of developer as well.

Even the minutest of change in the code could give rise to a new build. That is the reason many industry are using it.

Case Study : D4Science

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

Final Words

Jenkins is a very advance tool of DevOps that is making things extremely easy and fast. Using this tool industries are really making their technology better and could be able to provide their service better.