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

Upgrade strategies

The amount of risk we can take during an upgrade in exchange for an easier operation depends on the cost of a possible outage. On a small- to medium-scale Jenkins, a whole day of outage on a Saturday may be acceptable. On a large-scale Jenkins, not only is it important that we minimize the chance and the duration of an outage, but the upgrade must also be rehearsed in a staging environment before it is attempted in a production environment. Let's look at the upgrade strategy for each case, starting with the smaller of the two.

Upgrade strategy for a small- to medium-scale Jenkins instance

The key points of the first strategy are as follows:

  • Upgrade the plugins using Plugin Manager.
  • Upgrade all plugins and Jenkins each quarter (four times per year).
  • Upgrade Jenkins only to the LTS releases, as opposed to the very latest releases.
  • Upgrade the plugins before and after the Jenkins upgrades to minimize the chances of version...