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

Jenkins Configuration as Code (JCasC)

We've spent Part 1 of the book setting up Jenkins by hand, one button click at a time. Wouldn't it be nice if all of this could be codified? It would allow us to download a configuration file and run it to have fully configured Jenkins out of the box.

Jenkins Configuration as Code (JCasC), officially introduced in DevOps World - Jenkins World 2018, is a solution heading in that direction. It provides a way to declaratively apply a configuration to the Jenkins controller, agents, and plugins. Its admirable stated goal is to Configure ALL Jenkins initial setup with no hands on keyboard and no click on UI (https://www.jenkins.io/projects/jcasc/), which fully resonates with my aspiration to automate all things.

It's not perfect of course. Most notably, it doesn't support importing credentials (although there are advanced workarounds for determined admins). This means that any configuration item that requires a secret...