Jenkins Reviews

Jenkins is basically used as a CI/CD tool, wherein you can integrate multiple tools that are part of your delivery pipeline. Jenkins is basically a controller for your delivery. For example, what happens, when it happens, and in what sequence it happens can be controlled by Jenkins.

Jenkins is a very mature product. 

It has got a lot of support as far as integrating Jenkins with other tools is concerned. 

There are a lot of plugins as well if you want to enable any feature or any automation as part of your delivery pipeline. There are a lot of plugins, actually, which are available both as part of an open-source as well as a commercial ecosystem.

It is easy to configure and easy to scale as well.

The initial setup is easy.

The enterprise version is less stable than the open-source version. 

Security is one area that is lacking a bit. You need to have that extra work done when you are adopting Jenkins. There are some features here and there, however, if security overall can be improved, that would be really great.

I've used the solution for more than ten years. 

The solution is stable. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze.

It is scalable. Jenkins can be implemented in a master play mode. You can have multiple masters and you can have multiple notes on which you can execute your jobs, which makes it very scalable.

We have about 500 people using Jenkins.

We've never contacted external support. We've only dealt with internal support. Internal support is very well educated in terms of supporting Jenkins and other tools of concern. I'm very satisfied.

Jenkins was the first product I used. Apart from Jenkins, there are other tools I've used, like Bamboo. Then, specific to the cloud, we have other DevOps services, and other pipelines.  I have used multiple options. Still, I'm kind of a Jenkins fan. I definitely recommend Jenkins over other tools.

The initial setup is very easy. It's not overly complex or difficult. You can enable a Jenkins pipeline, I would say, and a day, or less than a day.

We have about ten staff members that can handle deployment and maintenance. There are managers, developers, and DevOps teams, and then there are SYSops, admins, and DBAs. All these factors are there.

We handled the implementation ourselves, in-house. We didn't need any integrators or consultants.

One good thing about Jenkins is there are two flavors. One is open-source and the other is the commercial or the enterprise edition. The open-source version is pretty stable. For the security concern, you can add your own security-related intervention to make it that much more secure.

For the enterprise edition, you have a cloud-based which actually provides the commercial Jenkins version. Apart from security, they have come up with upgraded versions of Jenkins, for example, Jenkins Access Control and Jenkins Two-point Access Control. You can get added all kinds of features and the ease of implementing or managing your product. As I mentioned, Jenkins open-source is actually more stable and mature if you compare it to the enterprise version.

The solution can be on-premises or in the cloud. 

I'd recommend the solution to others.

I'd rate it ten out of ten.

We use Jenkins to trigger the URL and necessary files in a batch. Jenkins is integrated with Jira and Litmus. We'll put a URL into Jenkins and trigger it. We can schedule it to run overnight every day, week, month, etc. 

Multiple teams are using Jenkins, and it's integrated with multiple Jira plugins. I believe around 250 people using it.

We can schedule anything with Jenkins, which is useful for deployment or anything that requires scheduling. It also has multiple plugins we can use for Maven, JUnit, etc.

Jenkins could have better cloud functionality. Currently, we are using the existing legacy model, but we are moving toward the cloud, so it would be great if they could improve in that area. In the future, I would like more cloud features and related training materials, like a video tutorial. 

I've been using Jenkins for one year, and I know about related automation tools like Selenium, Tosca, etc.

Jenkins' main advantage over other solutions is multiple plugins and ease of setup. Open-source and secured versions are also available, so maybe that's why there are multiple processes. Other deployment tools cost more, and the setup is messy. These are some reasons management decided to use Jenkins instead of other solutions.

The Jenkins setup is easy because it's open-source, and we can get a community edition. We don't need to do anything. We only need to install it and it's ready to use. The total deployment time depends on how long you have to code. In my case, it generally takes half an hour to one hour.

I rate Jenkins eight out of 10. It's a scalable, open-source tool with multiple plugins. It's easy to use and set up. I don't rate it 10 because there is room for improvement in terms of the cloud and related capabilities. 

If somebody wants to use Jenkins, they need to first consider the scope. What is the scope, and what tech are you using? Jenkins is easy to set up, and we can integrate it with multiple technologies, whether a .NET application or anything else. We can deploy the code and can run with that. 

I use Jenkins for the continuous integration and continuous delivery phases of my pipeline. For the continuous integration part, we use GitHub with Webhook. If we have a development environment and the developer pushes anything, Jenkins will trigger the job right away. But if it is going to stage all the production environments, then Jenkins will start the job, and the developer will create a pull request. 

We can see that the test cases have passed, and the GitHub branch is ready to be merged into the feature branch. And for the continuous delivery pipeline, we are pushing things ourselves through Helm. So whenever we have to deploy something, we have created or developed our stages, through which we use Helm charts and deploy our solution.

Since we are using microservice architecture, most of our infrastructure is Kubernetes-based, which means we use docker containers inside that and cloud environments to spin up our solutions quickly. Jenkins is running inside Kubernetes, and Jenkins has some hooks attached to it. And with the plugins attached, you can spin up the container on the go whenever we have to build a job. And when the job is complete, the container is deleted. It's not like we have some node in Jenkins. The architecture comprises a master and a slave node, and you can run jobs on the slave node.

Our slave nodes work under both containers, which we are only spinning up when we need. And when we are done, we are just stripping them out instead of having our virtual machines running all the time. That is an interesting aspect of this architecture for us. Microservices waste architecture, so we use Kubernetes infrastructure with containers to spin up our slave nodes and handle the workload or the computing.

We use Jenkins for everything. We want to empower developers to have the confidence to deploy their solutions themselves into production instead of asking us as an operations guide. Even if they have to create a repository in GitHub, we have scripts behind Jenkins that can go ahead and make these for them. It's a core component of our development pipelines and developers' lives in our organization.

We used to have around 30 to 40 services, which we had to use in our microservices architecture. Now, when we have to deploy things due to the same code base, we have to write the same code every time and repeatedly in the Jenkins file. It's a monotonous job, and we cannot innovate. We are just copy-pasting the Jenkins file and only changing a few things in it. That wasn't the kind of DevOps experience we want. We want some customization instead of a mundane task. But there is an option in Jenkins called Jenkins Shared Library, where we can write our own group code. Now we are using it like a programming language in the Jenkins file.

We only have to call the object and inside that object, we have to call the function or methods we want. Our Jenkins files, which were previously 309 lines were reduced to 220 or 230 lines by only calling the objects and the specific parameters. If I want Java, I will provide Java, so it is going to call the specific stage, defining my library for Java-based code. If it is NTM, it is going to call the different libraries along with the right tools for load-based applications and testing. That was a satisfying experience. As a DevOps team, we spent a lot of time creating good value in the pipeline stream instead of spending all our time copy-pasting the Jenkins file. 

The most valuable aspect of Jenkins is pipeline customization. Jenkins provides a declarative pipeline as well as a scripted pipeline. The scripted pipeline uses a programming language. You can customize it to your needs, so we use Jenkins because other solutions like Travis and Spinnaker don't allow much customization. We can only use the declarative pipelines they provide. 

We can use Jenkins through the GUI and create customized methods. Its GUI is just like Java, so we can make our classes and define our custom methodologies. We can do whatever we want and customize as much as we wish to in any programming language. 

Jenkins is a Java-based solution, and it's a hassle to initially spin up the solution in Java. Jenkins is highly customizable through plugins, but it has limited out-of-the-box capabilities. We have to take advantage of the community configurations available to us. 

And I don't care too much for the Jenkins user interface. It's not that user-friendly compared to other solutions available right now. It's not a great user experience. You can do just fine if you are a techie, but it would take a novice some time to learn it and get things done. 

I used Jenkins extensively this whole year. Prior to that, I was using it for consolidation stuff, but this year I have used it extensively for both installations and DevOps pipelines.

There have been no crashes. I would say that the only important thing is downtime. Since it is a double application, the reboot takes a long time. It would be nice if it took less time to boot. Sometimes it takes around 5 to 10 minutes to boot with all the plugins. It would be great to reduce the maintenance time so that the developers don't even notice when it has been updated. But when we update, we need to announce downtime for that.

We have a master node, and the slave nodes are containers, so it's quite robust and scalable with that plugin for us. Even if we have a lot of jobs running at one time — sometimes it's 30 to 50 jobs running — it's cloud infrastructure. It's going to spin up automatically. The nodes are auto-scaling for the Kubernetes, and you can spin up containers on top of that, so it's quite scalable for us.

We haven't needed Jenkins support yet. 

The initial configuration with Kubernetes is a little bit clunky. Maybe we don't know how to do it because things are ever-evolving, or perhaps there is a right way that we do not know right now. This is one of the pain points. If I have to update my cluster, or there is some disaster recovery mechanism, or I have to add something in the configurations, there is no out-of-the-box tool available in Jenkins.

If I'm going to change my configurations in the conflict maps, it will not reload by itself. I have to add another sidecar container, which always looks for my configuration change updates and adds it into Jenkins. That was my pain point, and that is the same in the initial configuration part that you have to figure out. Jenkins cannot provide you with something out of the box for continuous change and updates. You have to use some third-party plugins for the sidecar containers.

The initial deployment was relatively easy because we used the UI to configure everything. Then there is one part of the configuration code in Jenkins where we have to take the configuration and put it in the conflict map. Whenever we have to change something, we only need to change the configuration map. And it reloads that part. 

The code portion of the configuration is very lengthy, and it isn't easy to figure out what should go into the configuration and what is unnecessary. There is a lot of junk in that. This is not good for the developers to put in their configuration size, but that was their end. Figuring that out takes time. That said, it's a one-person job. You don't need too many people if you know what you are doing.

After installation, Jenkins requires some maintenance, like backup and configurations. If there are some security breaches, Jenkins sends out notifications that you need to update these plugins because there were some security flaws. Sometimes we have to reboot Jenkins to apply these updates, which requires some downtime. Most plugins don't need a reboot, but we have to reboot Jenkins if it involves some core components.

We used the free version. We didn't need anything specific on the support side for that. It's totally customizable, and if you get so much good out of an open-source project, then you don't need to go for any support model. That was quite good, and community support has been good enough for us.

I looked into Travis, and I was primarily looking for customization. Travis wasn't as customizable as Jenkins.

I would rate Jenkins between seven and eight because I'm not that much of a GUI user, so I can use it. And if I have my configurations in place, I don't have to go inside and look at the UI again. It's a good solution for us. 

Our main use cases are for restarting applications and monitoring system health. We instal the solution for companies and once it's up and running, we do all the health checks. We are customers of Jenkins and I'm a DevOps engineer. 

Jenkins has helped us to become more efficient and saves us a lot of time.

The solution is an integration tool and that is its value; we are able to integrate a lot of tools, whether it's Nexus for building automation, for plugins or repositories. This is what makes it a powerful tool. The most beneficial thing is being able to do everything with just one click, which was not possible previously when any changes needed to be carried out manually. Jenkins enables you to log in to multiple servers and it runs automatically on all your servers. 

I'd like to see some more features for scriptwriting and a more user-friendly UI for creating pipelines.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

We haven't had any problems with stability, even when we're running multiple builds. We use the product on a daily basis and although it doesn't require maintenance, there are some regular activities carried out by Jenkins every few months. 

If you're deploying on-premise, then scalability requires introducing new nodes and deploying application instances on two servers. We have multiple teams and they all have access to Jenkins so we currently have around 60 to 70 users.

We haven't had any problems with customer support. 

Our implementation process depends on what type of deployment is needed. If it's a very small chain and the deployment process is not complex, steps will be limited. If it's a larger implementation, more steps are involved and it becomes more complex. When needed, we have a networks team and a database team. For a small build, deployment can take 15 minutes. For a more complex build that has a lot of changes, it can take several hours.

It's important to know your requirements before implementing Jenkins. It's a good tool for integration and automation in an organization.

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

The primary use cases include manifest generation and publishing modules.

Whenever we do releases, it goes to Jenkins to publish a version of the application and the version being released. Jenkins plays a big role in this process.

GitHub linking is pretty good. We have a deployment application where we can run our tests and add various variables to be passed as assertions to those tests. This is pretty fluid with Jenkins.

It is a stable solution and is generally scalable.

Sometimes, random errors of metadata are not there, which causes delays. These are essentially gaps in the information being passed to the job. This could be reduced and would save a lot of time.

Jenkins runs in correlation with GitHub but can only run one job at a time. Also, that job is a pre-selected job. So, if you select a particular job, then that job would run for all your pull requests. It would be amazing if for pull request one, for example, I could do build one, and for pull request two, I could do build two.

I've been working with Jenkins for two years.

It's quite stable and pretty reliable.

To a large extent, it is scalable; after that, some manual interference is required at certain points.

In our company, everybody works with Jenkins, so we have more than 10,000-20,000 users.

I am satisfied with the technical support services.

I would recommend Jenkins and would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We primarily use the solution as a build automation tool.

If we have to do some automation, we have to deploy the code on a server, and on the production server, so we can create a Jenkins pipeline, which we can call from Jenkins itself. Therefore, whenever we want to deploy the code on a server, on the production server, we use the Jenkins pipeline.

Within the organization, we have to manage nine applications as DevOps engineers. My expertise is in Unix, so whenever they need any Unix-related help, I'm on it. Okay. For all the nine teams I have to maintain their tasks. It is up to me and I can use Jenkins, Ansible, et cetera. 

From a deployment perspective, we don't require any passwords or any permissions and all. Everything we can do from Jenkins.

Whenever something fails, so we have the facility to check the logs. Based on that, we can find the solutions and we can fix things.

The initial setup is simple.

The stability of Jenkins is good.

The dashboards are very good.

The solution has been very easy to use.

We have found that the solution offers very good, very clear documentation. Everything is laid out well and easy to explain to a new user.

There are some 13 commands that we cannot run for Jenkins. For those particular commands, for the smallest small command (not the bigger task at a deeper level), for example, a copy command, we cannot run it from Jenkins. We cannot change the ownership of any directory or file or any kind of directory. In that case, we have a dependency on, for example, Ansible. There are some limited commands in Jenkins. 

I joined this current organization in November of 2019. From November 2019 onwards, I've been using this. It's been approximately two years at this point.

The solution has been very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. 

In some cases, it is a very reliable solution and tool. We had some dependencies, however, we have another solution for those dependencies. Whenever we do not have any dependencies somewhere else, we can use Jenkins.

I've never attempted to scale Jenkins.

My team has nine applications. Our organization has between 250 to 300 people. Many people are using the product. I'm not sure how many teams we have, however, I am sure that all the teams are using Jenkins.

I don't directly deal with technical support. Typically, I create a ticket, however, usually,  I try troubleshooting from my end. If the issue is not from our end, we have to raise a GR ticket and it takes approximately 24 to 48 hours to get it resolved, or for them to actually get in touch with us. 

In my company, we also have a Sharepoint that contains troubleshooting documentation that is quite helpful.

I was previously using Ansible.

The solution offers easy deployment. We just need to follow some steps and we have to give some URL paths and that's all. It's not time-consuming.

Initially, we do the setup for a particular or one particular task. If whenever we get a request in the future and based on the task, we just make a copy of that initial task and we do the minor changes and in that way, we can implement new tasks very easily.

We have a Jenkins central team. Whenever they upgrade, they send us a notification. A separate team handles the upgrade.

We are able to implement the solution for our clients.

I understand that the licensing is renewed about once a year. The pricing itself is fine. I wouldn't describe it as being overly expensive.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using.

I'm just using this tool to automate items for my teams. Whenever my team requires my help, I support them.

I would recommend the solution to other users and organizations, however, it depends on the requirement and what exactly the users need. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I'm a software engineer at a large bank. 

Jenkins increases our performance efficiency and saves us a significant amount of time.

We were initially SQL-based until we moved to object-oriented language and started hosting our code on Jenkins. The main benefit for us is the automation and we've done it in such a way that you only need to run one build that triggers itself and the rest of the builds downstream. We're moving most of our builds over to Jenkins because of all the automation it offers. It has a good interface, is reliable, and saves time. 

I think the logs could be improved so that anyone using the build for the first time gets a better view as to how it's performing, what the data is, and what processing is occurring. I'd like to see errors displayed differently. It currently takes an effort to find out where an error is and I think the error message and logging which is not jargon-based, is something I would like to see included.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. We are a team of 25 people, all working with Jenkins in some way or other, whether it's the finance data adapter or the magnet platform, which is totally Java-based and uses Jenkins. We have mainly software engineers and a few business analysts on the team. We also have a maintenance team that deals with any issues that come up.

I have tried the partial plugin for Jenkins which we use for regression and analysis and it works well. 

Our technical support is all in-house. All software deployment information is available online and it's pretty easy to follow. 

We have a license contract with Jenkins. 

Jenkins is a great solution if you're looking at automation because it reduces manual work and improves performance. If you deploy it on cloud, then performance is improved further. It's worth reducing dependency by targeting a one-build solution for Jenkins. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

We are an automotive infotainment software provider. Our products are for infotainment. We have displays or music systems that are dealing with the Android operating system, and we are using Jenkins for some of the jobs.

We have two deployment models. One is on-premises, and the other one is the private cloud.

As an organization, we have multiple products and variants. For example, a customer or OEM has multiple car lines or brands. There is a common platform, and Jenkins is helping with the source code. From this common platform, each of the variants is taken for the build. We don't need to build and test. 

We get to see the results, and it is also useful to see the status in terms of success, failure, or any issue. We are able to get the status for a variant. It is connected to other dashboards such as Grafana, and we are able to see everything in one place. 

It has been helpful in monitoring the progress and understanding how the daily build is happening. It gives us confidence that the products that we have built are shippable. We are able to get the status of whether a product is shippable or has a problem. This is the advantage that we have from an organizational standpoint.

The auto-schedule feature is valuable. Another valuable feature is that Jenkins does not trigger a build when there is no change in any of the systems. Jenkins also supports most of the open-source plug-ins. 

There are a lot of things that they can try to improvise. They can reduce a lot of configurations. It is currently supporting Groovy for scripting. It would be really good if it can be improvised for Python because, for most of the automation, we have Python as a script. It would be good if can also support Python.

We have a lot of Android builds. These Android builds can be a part of Jenkins. It can have some plug-ins or configurations for Android builds. There should also be some internal matrix to check the performance. 

We also want to have more REST API support, which is currently not much in Jenkins. We are not able to get more information about running Jenkins. More REST API support should be provided.

I have been using this solution for almost six years.

It has been pretty stable. We haven't faced any issues. If you are running Jenkins in any lower hardware, or your machine or hardware is not that compatible, you might see some memory or Java issues. If you are running Jenkins in a good hardware environment, you don't see any problem. When you have the right hardware and proper memory, there is no problem.

Scalability is one of the challenging parts. Before the Docker area, we had a lot of challenges in terms of scaling because in one product, we had version 2.215, and in another product, we had a different version. If you want to migrate from one version to another or if you want to pull a different product, it took some time. It took two weeks time to set it up in a different environment. With the help of Kubernetes and Docker, we are able to spin off a couple of clusters with the Jenkins master. It is helping us a lot.

We have around 4,000 users for multiple Jenkins. We are a product-based company. Our products are built daily by using Jenkins. Out of 4,000, 60% of the users are using it for development and continuous release purposes. It is also used for nightly builds.

For support, we have only reached out to the open-source community. We find information on the web, and with trial and error, we are able to solve problems.

If you get any licensed product, you get support, but with open-source solutions, you don't get such support. So, we are fully dependent on the Jenkins community and people with some experience for fixing the issues.

It is straightforward. We have the software, and we create a Docker file. We use Jenkins as a master for our project, and we also build all plug-ins and create one Docker image. We give a single command to some administrative people to install the master.

In terms of deployment duration, we have an automated Docker setup, which hardly takes one day. The manual method would take a week.

There are a lot of frequent virtual updates from Jenkins. If there is a change, we put it into our Docker container, and then we will check and confirm it, which is a good part. If you are not going for Docker, there is a short maintenance period. For example, one version might support a plug-in, but another version might not support the same plug-in. In such a case, we have to deprecate the plug-in and go for another part.

We have 24/7 IT support at the global level. For any issues, we are able to take help. For master, we have one person dedicated not only to Jenkins but also to other deployments and technologies.

We tried CircleCI and Concourse, but we went ahead with Jenkins.

For a person who wants to get started with Jenkins, I would advise initially deploying Docker with Jenkins. You can also create a shared library in Jenkins. You should have some basic knowledge of the Groovy script.

I would rate Jenkins an eight out of ten.