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

Backup strategies

Everything in Jenkins is a flat file on the controller. This makes the backup very concise – just one directory, jenkins_home, needs to be backed up. We just need to determine the frequency and methods of backups.

Let's consider the tools that we have for a backup. Generally speaking, there are two methods: disk snapshots and file copies. We'll start with a disk snapshot, which is the simpler of the two.

Snapshotting the entire disk as an image

A disk snapshot creates an image that represents the controller's storage at a specific time. For example, on AWS Jenkins, the controller host's EBS volume would be snapshotted, and on firewalled Jenkins, the controller host's disk would be snapshotted.

The biggest advantage of a disk snapshot is that the backup and restore responsibilities can be delegated to a different group. The snapshot mechanism is uniform across all OSes and applications, so corporate IT-provisioned...