Lesson 1.1: What is Jenkins?
Jenkins is an easy-to-use open-source Java-based CI/CD tool. It has been around for some time, and several organizations use it for their CI/CD needs.
💡
Important Note: It is essential to have an understanding of Continuous integration & continuous delivery to understand Jenkins better.
Jenkins has huge community support and an ocean of plugins that can integrate with many open-source and enterprise tools to make your life so easy.
Despite the growing popularity of CI/CD tools like GitLab CI and GitHub Actions, which organizations increasingly adopt for their CI/CD needs, Jenkins remains widely used in many organizations.
As per the Developer Ecosystem Report, 54% of the developers use Jenkins for CI/CD.
Jenkins is commonly used for the following.
- Continuous Integration for application and infrastructure code.
- Continuous delivery pipelines are used to deploy the application to different environments using the Jenkins pipeline as code & Shared Libraries.
- Infrastructure component deployment and management using IaC Tools (Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes etc)
- Run batch operations using Jenkins jobs.
- Run ad-hoc operations like backups, cleanups, remote script execution, event triggers, etc.