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Jenkins Is Getting Old

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Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#141

Post by IshKebab »

fizwhiz wrote: post #99
KaiserPro wrote: post #95

I have been with jenkins since about 2010. At its peak I had to shepherd ~50 masters of varying ages, plugins and levels of customisations. Yes, it allowed repeatable builds, and it can be, in certain circumstances a very good replacement for cron jobs where you need to administer >5000 machines. However, it has an offensive UI, the plugin system appears to be designed to deliberately cause things to break, versionin…

Why does a fictional butler offend you?

I think he meant it's offensively bad.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#142

Post by jennbriden »

Hello, I see a lot of great feedback in this post. I am a product manager working at CloudBees, the primary corporate sponsor of Jenkins. Jenkins is now in the Continuous Delivery Foundation as well.

While it is easy to bash on an inanimate object, there are some very dedicated and empathetic people who care deeply about the project. Some of those people do this work in their off-hours and some to this work as part of their daily work activities AND also in their off hours.

In that spirit, we want to make Jenkins better and created a separate group at CloudBees in the Product and Engineering teams late last year. They focus on open source work for Jenkins and on some proprietary things for CloudBees Core (built on Jenkins). We also have a dedicated user experience/product designer who started working on the project a few months ago. One of the first things he and I worked on was creating a curated, tailored version of Jenkins via the CloudBees Jenkins Distribution. This distribution will focus more and more over time on a guided workflow for continuous integration and delivery with Jenkins. These patterns will also be shared with open source Jenkins - some through direct contributions and others through suggestions (better plugin categorization, documentation, etc.).

Please use this comment thread to share your constructive, honest feedback about how we can improve Jenkins.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#143

Post by bradrydzewski »

solatic wrote: post #104

OP really needs to try Concourse. Same container-based workflow as Drone that is touted as a solution, but more mature, and much more testable than Drone. Concourse really hits his requirements for ops-friendliness and testability. It's easy to upgrade because the web host and CI workers are completely stateless, and the work you do with Concourse is easy to test because the jobs themselves are all completely self-co…

Tekton [1] works in a similar manner where the pipeline stages define inputs, outputs and tasks. The great part about Tekton is it provides a set of building blocks that can be integrated into a larger system.

I hope to integrate Tekton into Drone [2] and allow individual projects to choose their pipeline execution engine. Projects can choose to start with a more basic engine, knowing they have the option to grow into something more powerful (and complex) when they need to.

[1] https://tekton.dev/ [2] https://github.com/drone/drone/issues/2680

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#144

Post by linuxftw »

mathewpeterson wrote: post #114
linuxftw wrote: post #66

Trying to integrate Jenkins w/ Github Enterprise proved to be a real pain for me. It wasn't clear what git* plugin is the best to use for how I wanted to setup builds. It's literally impossible to deploy Jenkins in a repeatable manner with just configuration files, you must get it online and use the api to configure such simple things as API keys (eg, specify the ID of the key so your jobs actually reference the key…

You definitely can configure Jenkins in a repeatable manor. See https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Groovy+Hook+Script You can write all the configuration in groovy and it will execute when the Jenkins process starts up. There is also "Jenkins Configuration as Code" plugin which allows you to have a single yaml file to configure most of the Jenkins system. https://github.com/jenkinsci/configuration-as-code-plugin…

I managed to accomplish the task at hand ~2.5 years ago, so yes, it's possible to deploy jenkins in a repeatable manner.

I guess what I'm driving at is that it's not very declarative and it's cumbersome.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#145

Post by michaelneale »

KaiserPro wrote: post #95

I have been with jenkins since about 2010. At its peak I had to shepherd ~50 masters of varying ages, plugins and levels of customisations. Yes, it allowed repeatable builds, and it can be, in certain circumstances a very good replacement for cron jobs where you need to administer >5000 machines. However, it has an offensive UI, the plugin system appears to be designed to deliberately cause things to break, versionin…

I think this "lesson" is not lost on many, including those that built and work with Jenkins and plugins. The Jenkins X project moved to a very different approach, a fresh start.

see https://cd.foundation/ & https://jenkins-x.io (it works with Jenkins if you like, but natively uses the new pipelines and no SPOF masters). Might not be for everyone but worth a look.

disclosure: cofounder of cloudbees here (wanted to comment on original article but not able to for some reason on medium).

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#146

Post by jniedrauer »

KaiserPro wrote: post #95

I have been with jenkins since about 2010. At its peak I had to shepherd ~50 masters of varying ages, plugins and levels of customisations. Yes, it allowed repeatable builds, and it can be, in certain circumstances a very good replacement for cron jobs where you need to administer >5000 machines. However, it has an offensive UI, the plugin system appears to be designed to deliberately cause things to break, versionin…

Do you self-host gitlab? I'd definitely consider moving but it would also mean moving my source control.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#147

Post by jennbriden »

majkinetor wrote: post #133
KaiserPro wrote: post #95

I have been with jenkins since about 2010. At its peak I had to shepherd ~50 masters of varying ages, plugins and levels of customisations. Yes, it allowed repeatable builds, and it can be, in certain circumstances a very good replacement for cron jobs where you need to administer >5000 machines. However, it has an offensive UI, the plugin system appears to be designed to deliberately cause things to break, versionin…

Gitlab is awesome, its impressive what you get for free. Runners are nice, can run in powershell, bash, docker, vm , you name it. The main problem with runner is that you cant easily execute build script on the host. Exec command isn't very useful and AFAIK deprecated.

CodeShip is also a SaaS and is, "Forever free: You can use up to 100 builds per month for free, with unlimited projects and unlimited team members."

We are also working at CloudBees to have CodeShip support the emerging Jenkins X Pipeline syntax (YAML that mirrors the functionality of the Jenkins Pipeline). This syntax was based on the Tekton project, driven by the Continuous Delivery Foundation and significantly influenced by Jenkins developers like Andrew Bayer and Devin Nusbaum and by their PM, Nofar Bluestein.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#148

Post by jniedrauer »

solatic wrote: post #104

OP really needs to try Concourse. Same container-based workflow as Drone that is touted as a solution, but more mature, and much more testable than Drone. Concourse really hits his requirements for ops-friendliness and testability. It's easy to upgrade because the web host and CI workers are completely stateless, and the work you do with Concourse is easy to test because the jobs themselves are all completely self-co…

The thing that turned me off concourse last time I checked it out is that their documentation assumes (assumed?) you're going to use BOSH. I don't want to have to learn and maintain yet another infrastructure as code tool, just for my build server. I know you can run concourse without it, but all their examples seemed to use it and I didn't want to hit edge cases that they didn't account for. So I gave up before too long.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#149

Post by badloginagain »

majkinetor wrote: post #130
badloginagain wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab CI is pretty good. I hate, on a fundamental level this whole "bash in YAML" trend. Let's take a powerful, turing complete language and put it in a _config file_. What? I don't even... And the fact that you only get _one_ .gitlab-ci.yml file. That is legitimate madness. Want modularized CI/CD configuration? Not in these parts, buster. Have submodule build dependencies? We laugh at your use case. Sure as shit be…

With newer versions you can include other yaml files. You can also have templates, special jobs starting with dot.

> With newer versions you can include other yaml files.

Where do you see this? Looking at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/18157 it seems this kind of support is still not started

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#150

Post by jennbriden »

stabbles wrote: post #81

Jenkins's plugin manager is absolutely terrible. If you're stuck on an older version of Jenkins, you better not click the "refresh" button in the plugin management page, cause otherwise the page is just filled with red warnings saying that the latest version of each plugin is incompatible or has dependencies that are incompatible with your current Jenkins version. There is afaik no way to install the last plugin that…

Check this out, too. Free forever: https://www.cloudbees.com/products/cloudbees-jenkins-distrib.... We have included Beekeeper, which is an implementation of the plugin manager that provides a list of known-compatible, recommended plugins that CloudBees verifies and tests with each long-term support release of Jenkins.
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