Book Image

Mastering Jenkins

By : jmcallister -, Jonathan McAllister
Book Image

Mastering Jenkins

By: jmcallister -, Jonathan McAllister

Overview of this book

With the software industry becoming more and more competitive, organizations are now integrating delivery automation and automated quality assurance practices into their business model. Jenkins represents a complete automation orchestration system, and can help converge once segregated groups into a cohesive product development and delivery team. By mastering the Jenkins platform and learning to architect and implement Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment solutions, your organization can learn to outmanoeuvre and outpace the competition. This book will equip you with the best practices to implement advanced continuous delivery and deployment systems in Jenkins. The book begins with giving you high-level architectural fundamentals surrounding Jenkins and Continuous Integration. You will cover the different installation scenarios for Jenkins, and see how to install it as a service, as well as the advanced XML configurations. Then, you will proceed to learn more about the architecture and implementation of the Jenkins Master/Save node system, followed by creating and managing Jenkins build jobs effectively. Furthermore, you'll explore Jenkins as an automation orchestration system, followed by implementing advanced automated testing techniques. The final chapters describe in depth the common integrations to Jenkins from third-party tools such as Jira, Artifactory, Amazon EC2, and getting the most out of the Jenkins REST-based API. By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge necessary to be the definitive resource for managing and implementing advanced Jenkins automation solutions for your organization.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Jenkins
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding the master and slave architecture


A standalone Jenkins instance can grow fairly quickly into a disk-munching, CPU-eating monster. To prevent this from happening, we can scale Jenkins by implementing a slave node architecture, which can help us offload some of the responsibilities of the master Jenkins instance. Let's clarify this concept. A Jenkins slave node is simply a device configured to act as an automation executor on behalf of the master. The Jenkins master simply represents the base installation of Jenkins. The master will continue to perform basic operations and serve the user interface, while the slaves do the heavy lifting.

This distributed computing model will allow the Jenkins master to remain responsive to users, while offloading automation execution to the connected slave(s). To illustrate the concept of a master, and slave mode architecture let's look at an example. Figure 2-1 shows a Jenkins master and three slave nodes of varying OS types:

Figure 2-1: A Jenkins...