Industry Use Cases of Jenkins

In 2021, When industries are running towards automation, adopting different DevOps tools to solve their industrial use-cases. In this race, Jenkins is one of the most promising tools. These automation tools not only automate the thing but also help in reducing the cost.

Jenkins — an open-source automation server that enables developers around the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software.

Jenkins is written in Java with plugins built for Continuous Integration purposes. Jenkins is used to building and testing your software projects continuously making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build.

Case Study of Topdanmark

Delivering tools and infrastructure to drive innovation

Since the company relies heavily on IT-infrastructure, it is imperative that every bit just works.

With roughly 400 IT-related employees in the company and just about 80 on the operations team, the rest of the developers support approximately 2,000 other employees. Within the Ops group, There are six-man DevTools team who maintain the server platform that runs most of the company’s a client/customer-related business applications. They keep approximately 1,000 servers alive. The servers are put into different categories, depending on which environment they live in.

Building automation with a highly-configurable Jenkins platform

Most of Topdanmark’s servers and all their desktops are virtualized, so they are easy to replace if something breaks down. In terms of Jenkins installations, they are all virtual.

Topdanmark has two Jenkins setups, legacy and CI/CD. In legacy setup, They have test, integration, release, and production environments. In the CI/CD setup, they have a non-production and a production environment.

The legacy setup is part of a pre-scheduled handheld deployment cycle, customized to whichever team uses it. Due to all the customizations, it could take several days from the developer request to having a working Jenkins instance. This is of course take several time but using CI/CD will make it easy and fast.

The new setup is automated and easier to maintain. For this new iteration, the team took a different, more modern approach to deliver the service to its users. They created a self-service portal that allows anyone within the company to ‘order’ a Jenkins instance, a huge timesaver.

Driving developer success with automation and responsiveness

Due to the very nature of development and a constant flow of business needs, organizations must support developers by supplying tools and solutions that allow them to create the software needed to solve the task at hand.

The secret behind this is that all the new Jenkins instances are based on spinning up a custom Jenkins Docker image, bootstrapping some multi-branch configuration — like predefined plugins — and creating the multi-branch repositories from one or more GitHub organizations that are part of the request-form.

To simplify the user experience even further, Topdanmark created quite a few Groovy scripts that can be used in the Jenkinsfiles. They basically hide all the complicated stuff but maintain control regarding internal audits, and other corporate rules.

Evolving tools, evolving applications

With the help of Jenkins, Topdanmark keeps tooling up to date. They are in continuous dialogue with the developers regarding what they want and need to do their job. By continuously evolving the tools, they better support them as they continue to evolve their applications.

In Jon’s Jenkins Is The Way user story, he cites several results due to his team’s use of Jenkins. These include 100% automation of Jenkins instances and the ability to release and deploy an artefact whenever, wherever. However, the outcome is one that Topdanmark — and Jon — is proudest of happy software developers, developing great software.

Topdenmark:

Topdanmark, a Danish insurance company offering a customer service platform that allows clients to easily and quickly manage their insurance, investments and pensions.

Final Words

Jenkins is a very advance tool of DevOps that is making things extremely easy and fast. Using this tool industries are really making their technology better and could be able to provide their service better.