What makes Jenkins everyone’s favorite in 2020
Why Jenkins is so popular among DevOps
Software development requires meticulous planning and strategy right from the inception of the idea of the product to delivering it to the end-users. A software application goes through many stages before it is ready to use by the customers. The different phases that a software application goes through before turning into reality is called a Lifecycle. Similarly, DevOps methodology also follows a lifecycle, the stages are as follows:
- Continuous Development
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Testing
- Continuous Deployment
- Continuous Monitoring
Each of the stages is very crucial and holds its own importance in software development. However, we are primarily going to focus on Continuous Integration and related tools.
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Let’s take a scenario to understand why Continuous Integration is required
A team of 3 developers (let’s call them A, B, and C) are working on an android application for sales personnel for a telecom company. Each of them has been assigned a different module to work upon. All of them are working independently and keep pushing the code on the repository every day. After a few months, the code development stage is over and now it’s time to integrate all the modules. As the integration phase starts, the team starts to face the real challenge. The integrated application does not work as per the expectations also there are newly found bugs in the testing than ever. The deadline is now approaching and the end product is still not ready to use.
The above scenario is no less than a nightmare but what could have the team done differently? The answer is in the next section.
Continuous Integration (CI)
The process implies a development practice where the developer’s team checks in the code regularly in the shared repository. Each developer can push the code several times throughout the day. The integrated version control system builds and tests the latest code in case any conflict happens between the old and latest code. So, Continuous Integration detects and resolves the errors in the early stage.
Sounds so relieving, isn’t it? To know how CI has implemented it, keep scrolling down.
Continuous Integration, How to do it?
So, we need a tool that can facilitate us in implementing the CI pipeline effectively. The answer to all the queries is Jenkins, a popular and very powerful application.
Jenkins is a self-contained, open-source automation tool which can be used to automate all sorts of tasks related to building, testing, and delivering or deploying software.
The three tasks of the software development process are done with a single tool!! Amazing, right? Now let’s look at how it works?
How does Jenkins work?
In the previous section, we looked at the practices before the advent of Jenkins. The process of integration without any automation tool was really cumbersome and the most tedious part. But with Jenkins, the same process is no more a nightmare. So, here is a pictorial representation to understand the Jenkins working.
✔ A team of developers (let’s call them A, B and C) check in the code in the shared repository throughout the day.
✔ Jenkins server monitors the code and prepares a build when the code commits.
✔ If the build result is successful then execute the next steps. If the build fails a notification is sent to the team of developers.
✔ On successful build integration, Jenkins runs the unit and acceptance tests. If everything goes well the server labels the build number. In the case of a test, failure mail is sent to the team.
✔ Lastly, build success email is also sent to the team.
What makes Jenkins so popular among DevOps?
Now that we know and understand how Jenkins works. But what makes it so special? Let’s find out.
Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration tool that works on the Java framework. It is primarily used to facilitate the CI process. Jenkins’s popularity lies in its features and advantages.
So let us have a look at some key benefits of using this tool:
✔ Easy installation and configuration Jenkins is platform-independent. It can run on any Windows, UNIX, and Mac operating systems. All the developer requires is to install Java on the system.
✔ Open-Source Jenkins is an open-source tool and has a huge contributing community. The tool is free which is a big plus.
✔ Massive Plug-in options Jenkins provides a lot of third-party plug-ins with the help of which various other tools can interact with Jenkins pipeline. Jenkins offers a wide range of plug-ins ranging from testing, monitoring to notification purposes.
✔ Ease of distribution The Jenkins tools pretty much automate the entire integration process. The early detection of errors in code building to finding bugs during testing makes the software development process quicker and efficient.
✔ Strong feedback system Jenkins has a very strong feedback mechanism. The developer’s team gets notified about any build job failure or a successful test result instantly via mail.
✔ Master-slave architecture The master-slave architecture feature makes Jenkins a dark horse among the available CI tools in the market. This idea behind using the architecture is to reduce the traffic on a single CI server.
