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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the challenges of upgrading Jenkins and then went through a mock-upgrade scenario.

We learned that the biggest challenge is managing the plugin versions because of both the compatibility issues with a new Jenkins version as well as the compatibility issues with an older version of the same plugin.

With an understanding of the challenges, we learned two ways of handling upgrades. The first method, using Plugin Manager to upgrade the plugins on the production Jenkins instance, is more suitable for a small- to medium-scale Jenkins due to the risks we're taking by installing the latest plugins. The second method of modifying the Dockerfile and testing the changes by creating a staging Jenkins is more suitable for a large-scale Jenkins where every change must be carefully controlled, even though it takes a lot more work than the first method.

We then followed the first upgrade method and learned how to use Plugin Manager to...