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

Understanding the challenges of plugin version management

The difficult part of upgrading Jenkins is managing the plugin versions. Let's go through a few scenarios to understand why.

Upgrading to the next immediate LTS version of Jenkins

Upgrading Jenkins can be trivially easy – just run a new container with an upgraded version. Container image versions are well defined after all (https://hub.docker.com/r/jenkins/jenkins/tags). This works well when the delta between the old Jenkins version and the new Jenkins version is small. Nearly all plugins installed on one long-term support (LTS) version of Jenkins will be compatible with the next immediate LTS version of Jenkins. This means that starting a new container with an upgraded version of Jenkins using the existing plugins will most likely work:

Figure 8.1 – A simple upgrade by using a newer controller image

Once the new version of Jenkins is running, we can...