What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is an open-source server that automates the time-consuming tasks of building, testing, and deploying software. By helping developers streamline these traditionally tedious processes, Jenkins accelerates the development process, helps reduce error rates, and frees up developers’ time so they can focus on more high-level tasks. 

Jenkins automations support continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) processes in DevOps projects. DevOps is an approach to software development that improves communication and collaboration between developers and IT operations. It uses Agile principles and automation to break the silos between the two teams and increase the speed and quality of their work. Here’s a breakdown of what CI and CD involve:

• Continuous integration promotes incremental software improvements by allowing developers to integrate changes as often as possible. Automation tools like Jenkins facilitate this process by testing and validating each change before it’s integrated into the main branch.

• Continuous delivery goes a step beyond continuous integration. In addition to automating building and testing, it also automates the deployment process. The approval for deployment can be done manually or automated. When this final decision is automated, the process is known as continuous deployment.

DevOps teams adapt Jenkins to their projects by building custom pipelines. A pipeline is a set of automations that allow developers to build, test, and deploy code. Jenkins pipelines are made of different plugins that developers can combine to build automated workflows that suit each project’s needs.

Once developers build a pipeline, Jenkins will continuously track, build, and test any changes made to a project and alert developers of any errors. If the changes don’t contain any errors, Jenkins moves them to a staging environment where they remain ready for deployment. In cases where the pipeline is set up for both CI and CD, Jenkins will move changes all the way to the production environment. 

Jenkins’s flexibility, stability, and high level of community support have made it one of the leading CI/CD tools. Because of this, Jenkins is a must-have in any back-end or DevOps developer’s tech stack.