Jenkins Pipeline Updates That May Help Your Software Pipeline

A new feature in the increasingly popular Jenkins automation server may affect how you implement DevOps - in a good way. Companies that are looking to create continuous delivery and continuous integration solutions are looking more and more to Jenkins because of its fast moving improvements. 54% of companies practicing continuous delivery are now using Jenkins, with that number expected to rise over the coming years.

The Jenkins Project Announcement

The Jenkins project, the "official" community that is behind Jenkins, recently announced an entirely new way for companies to automate their continuous delivery pipelines. The team has currently put an update to Jenkins on the market that is designed primarily for the following:

• Improve the usability of Jenkins - The functionality of the pipeline is now more accessible to newbies as well as Jenkins experts. You no longer need to be a coding genius to understand what is going on.
• Accelerate continuous delivery adoption - The ease of use and the reduction of the learning curve vastly improves the ability of the standard to be extended across departments and into non-technical disciplines.
• Increase the productivity of DevOps teams - Users now have the ability to quickly create continuous delivery pipelines that are increasingly complex. Multi branch pipelines can be more easily modified, shared and advanced between departments.

The new release features a number of new graphical interfaces that allow teams to build continuous delivery pipelines visually as well as textually. A new graphical editor, shared libraries for pipelines and a declarative syntax are the major upgrades that users will now enjoy.

Notes from the Founder

Kohsuke Kawaguchi himself, founder of Jenkins, took to the airwaves to announce the updates. He declared that the new Jenkins pipeline allows for easier and more convenient definitions of CD pipelines. Now that multi branch pipelines can be built and maintained graphically, coders can easily share advancements with non-coders, and non-programmers can initiate new branches and even formats.

The new Declarative Pipeline Syntax gives every department the ability to construct pipelines with a format that comes predefined. With the smaller pieces already defined, putting together the puzzle pieces becomes a snap with a little training. The Jenkins workflow is now much more straightforward, and full pipeline creation is accessible to all of a company's users.

Getting in Ahead of the Curve

Jenkins is currently the most popular automation server on the market today that is open source. There are over 133,000 active installations with over one million total users. The Jenkins 2 update has been even more quickly adopted than its predecessor. Just under half of active Jenkins users were using the 2.0 update at the end of 2016. The plugin ecosystem also continues to expand, and is currently the most extensive for CD pipelines.

In short: If you are not on this train, it is time to get on, whether or not your in house staff has any coding genius!