What is Jenkins? – A quick introduction
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are an integral part of DevOps as they help us integrate practices such as continuous testing and automated deployment. Many CI/CD tools are out there, but Jenkins tops the list.
Having said that, you may wonder what is Jenkins?
RIght? So, in this blog, we will walk you through what Jenkins is, how it works, and a few boons and banes of using Jenkins.
Table of Contents
What is Jenkins?
Jenkins is a Java-based open-source server that performs on any platform. It allows you to automate the continuous integration process by performing a sequence of operations.
Jenkins automated software builds continuously and notifies developers of mistakes as soon as they occur. Jenkins is successful for One main reason – its active community. Jenkins has a vibrant plugin ecosystem in addition to being expandable.
History of Jenkins:
Jenkins has an advantage as an early adopter because it has been under development since 2011. While working at Sun Microsystems, Kohsuke Kawaguchi built Jenkins (then called ‘Hudson’). Hudson was created in the summer of 2004 and released for the first time in February 2005.
In February 2011, Oracle wanted Hudson’s development to continue therefore Hudson was forked rather than renamed Jenkins. Jenkins attracted many more projects and contributors than Hudson.
Salient features of Jenkins
- Jenkins has a massive community that helps develop & test plugins available to 1500+ users today. These members are the backbone of the project, which is one of the reasons for Jenkins’ success.
- Jenkins was created to simplify distributing work over numerous computers and platforms for quicker development, testing, and deployment.
- Jenkins is an open-source project therefore it’s free to use. Additionally, the community’s substantial involvement provides help for tasks like extensibility, support & documentation. The community makes Jenkins a powerful CI/CD tool.
- Jenkins was written in Java and is available for most operating systems. They work with Windows, Mac OS, and Unix variants.
Advantages:
The following are some of the significant advantages of utilizing Jenkins:
- Jenkins is an open-source application that is completely free to use. Because it has been in development for a long time, it is a favorite CI/CD solution for both early-stage businesses and major corporations.
- Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server that automates many of the operations, including packaging the application and dependencies, performing unit tests, building the application, e2e tests, API automation tests and more.
- Jenkins Pipelines may be pretty helpful when realizing CD needs for large projects.
- Jenkins may be used with various cloud systems, including Amazon EC2, Google Cloud, VMWare vSphere, Digital Ocean, and others.
- It has a diverse ecosystem of plugins. There were around 1500 plugins available.
Disadvantages:
Jenkins has several flaws of its own (not necessarily disadvantages). The following are some of Jenkins’ key spots:
- Jenkins is more ‘feature-driven’ and ‘developer-centric’ as a product. Jenkins may need a learning curve for those who are fascinated with user interfaces.
- Changes in settings may cause problems, such as Jenkins not starting up. In such cases, you must look for a solution online, which you will thankfully do because Jenkins has a vast user base!
- Overall, Jenkins is a strong continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform that is actually created for developers!
Based on what we talked about in the Jenkins article, we can say that Jenkins has features that make releases faster.