Jenkins Reviews

We use Jenkins for management purposes.

The most valuable features of Jenkins are creating builds, and connecting them with Sonar for Sonar analysis. Additionally, we connect it with other vulnerability tools, such as WhiteSource which is useful.

Jenkins could improve the integration with other platforms.

I have been using Jenkins for approximately two years.

Jenkins is stable.

I have found Jenkins to be scalable.

We have different teams within our company using this solution with different types of setups. We have approximately 25 users using the solution.

I have not contacted the support from Jenkins.

The initial implementation of Jenkins is simple.

The installation of Jenkins is done by our team.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Jenkins an eight out of ten.

The simplicity of Jenkins and the evolving ecosystem of Jenkins are most valuable. Today, you do not have to write a pipeline from scratch. The library functionality of Jenkins helps you to bring all those in ready-made, and you also get the best practices for them. That is a great feature of Jenkins, and that is why it is being used significantly.

Jenkins also helps you to be agnostic to cloud providers.

I would like to have an integrated dashboard on top of it and a better UX to look at. The dashboard could be better in terms of integration with other tools. We should be able to have a single pane of glass across all the tools that we use where Jenkins is the pipeline. This can be a very good upgrade to it.

I have been using this solution for about 10 years.

It is very stable.

It is highly scalable, and it can scale into different models.

In terms of its customers, I have worked with very big enterprises to small companies with about 100 people.

Jenkins is an open-source initiative. So, the support is more community-based. The community is great. I do not remember asking for help often because it is quite stable, but for any extensibility that can be built on it, the community is great. You can find lots of resources and helpful people.

It is definitely not complex. It might not be very easy for a newcomer, but it is in the easy to medium range to get started with.

As people are using it, they should come to the community and provide their input so that the community can grow better.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for the whole automation cycle for the deployments. We are using Jenkins and pipelines for once commits or push commits on Bitbucket or directories. Jenkins is listening for those changes and is applying (or triggered by) the repository changes to deploy and run the test cases, automate test cases, and deploy them on servers for the deployment, testing, or production.

It's open-source and free to use.

The learning curve for Jenkins is not a big deal. It has a lot of community posts and support. 

The initial setup is simple. 

We have found the solution to be stable.

It is my understanding that the solution can scale. 

Jenkins is on-premise (on our infrastructure) and Bitbucket or Azure directories are on the cloud. Therefore, triggering from the repositories to the on-premise, Jenkins is not applicable. We are trying to reach them now, and we are currently using a plan or a process to listen to the repositories every once in a while to know if there are no new changes applied. It triggers the automation for the deployment and the running test cases, and therefore it may take two minutes or three minutes to have the deployment done after the latest commit. This is due to the fact that we are using on-premise Jenkins for on-premise deployment, yet have the repositories on the cloud. There is no way for the cloud repositories to trigger Jenkins. We are trying to research now how to have the Jenkins over a public IP, so the repositories can trigger it.

We have been dealing with Jenkins for around three years now.

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

Although it is my understanding the solution can scale, we don't have much information about scalability for the Jenkins. We didn't investigate scaling yet.

We tend to search for solutions online. I've never reached out to technical support. I rely more on the community. 

It's pretty straightforward to set up the product. The DevOps team just took around two weeks or three weeks for the first deployment, for automation for the first deployment using Jenkins. It fulfilled our requirements. DevOps is not a target by itself, DevOps is an operation to remove any pain areas, or time-consuming tasks, or to automate it to have it in seconds. It fulfills our requirements.

The product is open-source.

For the development environment, we are using the on-premise infrastructure. For some customers we are also using on-premise; for other customers, we are using the cloud.

We have branches in Egypt and branches in Dubai that are using Jenkins for the whole automation process and we're really enjoying using it.

I would recommend the solution to others.

I'd give it a rating of seven out of ten.

I'm using Jenkins for CI/CD pipelines. We have around 400 dashboards and BI applications that need to be deployed when we make changes and push it all out on GitHub. 

I create webhooks from GitHub to trigger the Jenkins pipeline, which runs a script that I'm writing in Python. This deploys the applications to their respective application servers.

Jenkins allows us to automate deployment, so I no longer have to do it manually. That's the primary use case. The other advantage of Jenkins is that it's open source. It was free for me to download and install. It's a product that's been in use for many years, so I can find a lot of support online for any issues that I may encounter while configuring anything for a given use case.

I like that Jenkins integrates seamlessly with GitHub, and it's able to clone a lot of repositories. There is also a workflow sequence where I can write my script so that it goes through a particular workflow channel and all the scripts run. 

Jenkins offers many environment variables, allowing me to customize it and deploy in various environments without too many changes to the record. It's fairly sophisticated in that sense.

Many of the Jenkins servers I install are on a system in some restricted zone where the server doesn't have internet access. This is problematic because Jenkins requires many plugins to integrate with GitHub or add custom functions, so it would be helpful if the plugins were pre-installed with the product.

Installing them online is easier because I can go ahead and search for the plugins I need. However, I have to download every plugin when I'm using this tool on a server in a high-security zone with no internet access. Each plugin depends on another, so the plugins have to be installed in a particular order, or installing all the plugins is extremely difficult. If the prerequisite is not installed, and I install the other one, it goes out and gives me an error. It's a complicated process to do it.

When this tool does not satisfy a particular requirement, I map the requirement to some other tool and proceed with it. There are different tools for various use cases, so I use whatever I have. I don't expect a single product to provide all the functionalities I need.

I've been working on Jenkins for about a year.

If there isn't any problem with the server where Jenkins is installed, I don't have any issues with Jenkins. We have had to restart it a few times to free up memory, but we run it on a multi-node cluster. That helps because we can redirect traffic through one of the servers while we restart the other. Some minor restarts need to be done to free up memory, but we have redundancy in place so it doesn't affect the system availability.

Jenkins' scalability is good because we can connect it to as many repositories as possible. I can create a hierarchy of jobs and set up a proper workflow to trigger the jobs in sequence. One level of the hierarchy is the build steps, and on top of those, we have hierarchy of jobs. Each job can trigger another job as well.

We use Jenkins throughout the entire organization to deploy a lot of applications. Every software development team in my organization uses Jenkins. Our developers have standardized the process and created another tool on top of the Jenkins server. 

We primarily use community support. Jenkins is widely used, so the community knowledge base is very rich. For any given question we have, the chances are good that someone has been asked it a couple of years ago, and it has already been answered well. We only need to recreate the solution online. Support is extensive.

Google provides a service similar to Jenkins called Cloud Build, but we'd have to purchase it because it's not open source. And since it's provided a GCP service, it's on the cloud. Most of the features that Jenkins offers is are available GCP. However, the server infrastructure is managed by GCP, so we don't have the flexibility to configure and change many things about the way the system works. 

There is a set of features available to us, and we can put some parameters in place to make it work. But the problem is that Cloud Build isn't very flexible in terms of its configuration. We have the same issue with AWS CodeDeploy, another service like Jenkins.

Most of the configurations we do have already been set by the cloud provider. Let's say Jenkins asks us to configure five to 10 things, and the cloud provider only asks us to configure one or two. Again, the problem is we do not have the option to customize. 

What's more, GCP or AWS services for CI/CD pipelines are tied to the other services in the cloud. For example, AWS has its own source control system called as CodeCommit. CodeDeploy is connected to it and another service called Pipeline.

You can fluidly orchestrate code with minimal administration or configuration. All changes you make on CodeCommit go through the workflow by just inputting the scripts. You don't have to do a lot of configuration like you need to do in Jenkins. AWS takes care of all of that. You can put some approval process to see if the build has succeeded. You need someone to go in and approve it before it's deployed. All those things can be done that aren't possible in Jenkins.

If I'm installing Jenkins on Windows, it's a simple graphical user interface similar to any installer. I only have to specify the port where this needs to be installed to open it and then configure the login. It's not intuitive to figure out what needs to be done because Jenkins is open source. As soon as we install it, it outputs some text file to one of the folders where Jenkins has been installed, and we generally don't have an idea of where that file will be.

That's the kind of thing you have to figure out using community support. I go to that file, find the temporary password, and set the login credentials. After the installation, I access the specific port where the server was installed via a local host. Then I log in to the Jenkins server and start configuring all the necessary elements I want in my deployment process.

The initial setup takes about 15 to 20 minutes, but I sometimes face a bottleneck when installing the plugins on an offline machine. Mapping the dependencies and then installing the correct sequence of dependencies is a nightmare, and it took me two days to do it. However, it generally takes only a day to get it completely configured.

Sometimes the batch scripts or any scripts we put in place might be a version that Jenkins doesn't support. We either have to make sure our scripts are compatible with the Jenkins version or update Jenkins. That sort has happened, but it's rare. Maybe it's because I've only worked on Jenkins for a year, and I haven't seen a lot of difficulties over there. I think there should be some maintenance, but from my experience, I've found it to be very minimal.

Jenkins is completely open source. 

I'd rate Jenkins about six out of 10 because it doesn't have much out-of-the-box integration. Everything needs to be done manually. On the other hand, it's free, so that makes up for the shortcomings. It depends on an organization's needs and budget requirements because it's not something I pay for.

I would recommend it for certain use cases. It depends upon the project. For example, Jenkins might be suitable for a client who doesn't use a cloud provider to deploy their CI/CD pipelines, and they're deploying on their on-prem system. Also, if they're in their POC phase and are unsure how much budget will be allocated to the project, I definitely recommend Jenkins to be their first-go solution for a CI/CD pipeline.

We use Jenkins for building our applications, deploying our applications, and some automation tasks.

We are using the open-source version and there is a lot of plugins and features that are available and it works on agents for free. In other solutions, it will cost extra to use them with the agent.

The UI of Jenkins could improve.

I have been using Jenkins for approximately six years.

Jenkins is stable. It provides all the required features for stability, such as backups.

Jenkins is scalable because it is open source and it integrates with other third-party vendor tools which are currently in the market, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS. It gets very well integrated with all the new tools, it doesn't remain isolated.

We have multiple projects that are using this solution and each project has multiple users. In one project we could have 50 users or in another 10 users are using it.

We didn't face any issues to escalate to Jenkins for technical help.

We have previously used Bamboo. I use both Jenkins and Bamboo per our project requirements. Jenkins is more suitable for commercial projects and is more scalable and flexible as compared to other tools because its core focus is on integrating and updating automatically.

The initial setup of Jenkins was straightforward. It's very lightweight and it only requires Java on your system as a requirement.

We did the implementation of the solution ourselves with our team.

We are using the free version of Jenkins. There is not a license required to use the solution because it is open-source.

My advice to others is to explore Jenkins well and it is integrated with the scripting site. Teams should explore the scripting part of the Jenkins because everybody's nowadays is writing pipeline as a code for automating their operations. They should try to utilize the new feature provided to them, such as pipeline as a code. 

It does not matter what solution they are using, such as Microsoft Azure DevOps or Amazon AWS DevOps, Jenkins will integrate with other solutions. They should try and use Jenkins even if they're using some other tool.

I rate Jenkins an eight out of ten.

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. 

My primary use case is as a CI pipeline in order to deploy onto the GCP. This allows us to push any changes into the master brand.

The major benefit of using Jenkins is that it's a very secure way of deploying something to the cloud. It has also improved the drawbacks of manual deployments by making them more robust and secure, and it helps the user avoid mistakes because all the checks are there in one script which can be used every time.

The most valuable feature of Jenkins is the logs it provides - these are very helpful in understanding error conditions so we can see where the problem lies and go in and check it. Another useful feature is the GUI, which estimates how long a particular model will need to be executed. It's also very easy to understand for newcomers. 

One area for improvement would be the UI, which currently looks quite outdated and requires the user to go through too many steps. In the next release, I would like to have the ability to use the command prompt to navigate between repositories and to enable features.

There are some minor bugs with this solution, but overall the stability is ok.

Jenkins is very scalable.

The initial deployment is easy if you are familiar with script creation - a person who is unfamiliar with this might have difficulties with setup. It can be set up by a single person in four to five hours.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

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.