How Industries uses Jenkins (use cases of Jenkins)

Jenkins is the most famous Continuous Integration tool, I know you are curious to know the reason behind the popularity of Jenkins, and if Jenkins is easy to learn. I am pretty sure after reading this What is Jenkins blog, all your questions will get answered.

Let us understand what is Jenkins in simple words.

What is Jenkins and why we use it?

Jenkins is an open-source automation tool written in Java with plugins built for Continuous Integration purposes. Jenkins is used to build and test 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. It also allows you to continuously deliver your software by integrating with a large number of testing and deployment technologies.

With Jenkins, organizations can accelerate the software development process through automation. Jenkins integrates development life-cycle processes of all kinds, including build, document, test, package, stage, deploy, static analysis, and much more.

Jenkins achieves Continuous Integration with the help of plugins. Plugins allow the integration of Various DevOps stages. If you want to integrate a particular tool, you need to install the plugins for that tool. For example Git, Maven 2 project, Amazon EC2, HTML publisher etc.

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.

Jenkins Features

The following are some facts about Jenkins that makes it better than other Continuous Integration tools:

• 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 tool.

What is 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, etc.

Let us understand its importance with a use-case.

Continuous Integration Example: Nokia

I am pretty sure you all have used Nokia phones at some point in your life. In a software product development project at Nokia, there was a process called Nightly builds. Nightly builds can be thought of as a predecessor to Continuous Integration. It means that every night an automated system pulls the code added to the shared repository throughout the day and builds that code. The idea is quite similar to Continuous Integration, but since the code that was built at night was quite large, locating and fixing of bugs was a real pain. Due to this, Nokia adopted Continuous Integration (CI). As a result, every commit made to the source code in the repository was built. If the build result shows that there is a bug in the code, then the developers only need to check that particular commit. This significantly reduced the time required to release new software.

Case Study: Netflix

Netflix is a streaming service that offers a wide variety of award-winning TV shows, movies, anime, documentaries, and more on thousands of internet-connected devices. So Netflix greatly uses Jenkins for its use case. Once a line of code has been built and tested locally using Nebula, it is ready for continuous integration and deployment. The first step is to push the updated source code to a git repository. Teams are free to find a git workflow that works for them.

Once the change is committed, a Jenkins job is triggered. Netflix’s use of Jenkins for continuous integration has evolved over the years. They started with a single massive Jenkins master in their datacenter and have evolved to running 25 Jenkins masters in AWS. Jenkins is used throughout Netflix for a variety of automation tasks above just simple continuous integration.

A Jenkins job is configured to invoke Nebula to build, test and package the application code. If the repository being built is a library, Nebula will publish the .jar to our artifact repository. If the repository is an application, then the Nebula os package plugin will be executed.

Who uses Jenkins?

2836 companies reportedly use Jenkins in their tech stacks, including Facebook, Netflix, and Udemy.

• Facebook
• DELL
• Udemy
• InstaCard
• Robinhood
• Twitch
• Nokia Simens
• Lyft
• NASA
• SpaceX
• Delivery Hero
• LinkedIn

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