Jenkins is an open-source, self-contained continuous integration/continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD) software used for automating tasks while building, testing, delivering, and deploying software. It allows developers to find and solve faults in a code quickly and to automate the testing of the build pipeline in real time. It is one of the leading open-source automation DevOps servers available that is written in the Java programming language.
It provides an extensible, plugin-based architecture, enabling developers to create 1,400+ plugins to adapt them to a multitude of build, test, and deployment technology integrations.
What Exactly is Jenkins Used for?
It allows the developer to continuously create and test software projects, resulting in easier integration of changes in the project and getting a new version of the build.
Advantages of Jenkins
Jenkins helps to create robust automated pipelines based on continuous integration and continuous delivery principles. By using this pipeline, Users have many advantages.
- Flexibility: It supports complex continuous delivery requirements that include the flexibility to fork/join, loop, and perform work in parallel.
- Distributed: It leverages a Primary/Secondary architecture with a main central server (Primary) and a Distributed workload (Secondary) so that users can run multiple test environments and build simultaneously.
- Durability: It supports both planned and unplanned restart of Jenkins master.
- Extensibility: It supports a custom extension to its Domain Specific Language (DLS) and multiple other options through other plugins.
- Pausable: It can be paused and wait for user approval before moving forward.
- Support for Multi-Branch Pipeline Projects: It supports multi-branch projects that enable users to implement different configuration files for different branches in the same project. In these projects, Jenkins automatically discovers, manages, and executes Pipeline for the same branch.
Does anyone still use Jenkins?
It is used in modern software development life cycles by many companies. Some of them are listed below.
- Meta
- Alphabet(Google)
- Netflix
- Udemy
- Instacart
- Dailymotion
- Robinhood
What is the difference between Jenkins and GitHub Actions?
Jenkins deployments are self-hosted, where users maintain the servers in their data centers. GitHub Actions offers a hybrid cloud approach where we can host our runners to run the job, while it supports the self-hosted runners too.
