Jenkins Use Cases ❕

Dileepkumar
3 min readMar 12, 2021

What is Jenkins ?

Jenkins is a self-contained, open-source automation server which can be used to automate all sorts of tasks related to building, testing, and delivering or deploying software.

Continuous integration pipeline is a set of sequential or parallel jobs, these jobs are designed to perform a set of tasks which are configured using the GUI interface.

The core technology driving that initiative was Jenkins, an open source tool to build continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. … And the open source version of Jenkins was the obvious choice due to its flexibility, openness, powerful plugin-capabilities, and ease of use.

Now a days many Companies use Jenkins because it makes work goes smoothly without human effort.

Advantages of Jenkins include:

  • It is an open-source tool with great community support.
  • It is easy to install.
  • It has 1000+ plugins to ease your work. If a plugin does not exist, you can code it and share it with the community.
  • It is free of cost.
  • It is built with Java and hence, it is portable to all the major platforms.
  • Adoption: Jenkins is widespread, with more than 147,000 active installations and over 1 million users around the world.
  • Plugins: Jenkins is interconnected with well over 1,000 plugins that allow it to integrate with most of the development, testing and deployment tools.

Some Use cases

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration is a development practice in which the developers are required to commit changes to the source code in a shared repository several times a day or more frequently. Every commit made in the repository is then built. This allows the teams to detect the problems early. Apart from this, depending on the Continuous Integration tool, there are several other functions like deploying the build application on the test server, providing the concerned teams with the build and test results

Continuous Development

As taking the previous example of trivago after updating the code we will also test the code on servers and deploy the code on the production server. This step is continuously running as code update this step will run.

Both the above terms Continuous Integration and Continuous Development are the runnings infinitely running in a loop.

Jenkins lowers the Effort of repeated coding

with the uses of Jenkins, one can convert a command prompt code into a GUI button click. This can be done by wrapping up the script as a Jenkins job. Parameterized Jenkins jobs can be created for customization or to take user input. Thus, hundreds of lines of code writing can be saved.

Effortless Auditing

Jenkins jobs, when run, capture console output from stdout as well as stderr. Troubleshooting with the uses of Jenkins is also very clear. For performance tuning each individual job, run timing can be measured and slowest step can be identified using Time stamper plugin.

Decrease Code Review Time

CI systems such as Jenkins and Version Control System such as Git can communicate with each other and inform the users when a merge request is suitable for merge. This is usually when all the tests are passed, and all other requirements are met.

Conclusion

With great progress in software technologies, Companies requires development teams to produce and deliver high-quality software better and faster than their competition. Today, development teams are building scalable and efficient software delivery engines by creating repeatable processes which standardize development and its best practices. Automated testing is one such activity by which developer’s code is tested in the same standard way for every change and every cycle so that management and other users can trust that every change is well tested before it is moved to production.

Uses of Jenkins can save a lot of time for developers, improves code quality and coverage and provide management great control over software development . Thus, It is very well appreciated and a lot of companies uses it on a daily basis. It’s a great tool to learn for upcoming software developers too.

Thanks for Reading.. 😎

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