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Module 1: Introduction to Jenkins

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.

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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.

  1. Continuous Integration for application and infrastructure code.
  2. Continuous delivery pipelines are used to deploy the application to different environments using the Jenkins pipeline as code & Shared Libraries.
  3. Infrastructure component deployment and management using IaC Tools (Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes etc)
  4. Run batch operations using Jenkins jobs.
  5. Run ad-hoc operations like backups, cleanups, remote script execution, event triggers, etc.