Book Image

Jenkins Administrator's Guide

By : Calvin Sangbin Park, Lalit Adithya, Sam Gleske
Book Image

Jenkins Administrator's Guide

By: Calvin Sangbin Park, Lalit Adithya, Sam Gleske

Overview of this book

Jenkins is a renowned name among build and release CI/CD DevOps engineers because of its usefulness in automating builds, releases, and even operations. Despite its capabilities and popularity, it's not easy to scale Jenkins in a production environment. Jenkins Administrator's Guide will not only teach you how to set up a production-grade Jenkins instance from scratch, but also cover management and scaling strategies. This book will guide you through the steps for setting up a Jenkins instance on AWS and inside a corporate firewall, while discussing design choices and configuration options, such as TLS termination points and security policies. You’ll create CI/CD pipelines that are triggered through GitHub pull request events, and also understand the various Jenkinsfile syntax types to help you develop a build and release process unique to your requirements. For readers who are new to Amazon Web Services, the book has a dedicated chapter on AWS with screenshots. You’ll also get to grips with Jenkins Configuration as Code, disaster recovery, upgrading plans, removing bottlenecks, and more to help you manage and scale your Jenkins instance. By the end of this book, you’ll not only have a production-grade Jenkins instance with CI/CD pipelines in place, but also knowledge of best practices by industry experts.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Acquiring domain names and TLS/SSL certificates

A production-grade web service should use a domain name and HTTPS, even if it's an internal tool. Let's examine their role in our architecture.

Domain names

Two domain names are needed for the two Jenkins instances. If you are using a subdomain of your company's domain (for example, jenkins.companyname.com), be sure that you can modify the A record, CNAME, and TXT record for the domain name. A new .com domain name can be purchased from AWS for around $12. For the AWS Jenkins instance, the DNS configuration is simpler if the domain is managed through Route 53. In our setup, we will be using jenkins-aws.lvin.ca and jenkins-firewalled.lvin.ca.

TLS/SSL certificates

TLS (also commonly referred to as SSL, which is TLS's predecessor technology) enables HTTPS, which allows secure communication. A TLS certificate can be obtained in several different ways:

  • AWS Certificate Manager provides free...