Issue
The Jenkins landscape is vast and new progress is difficult to keep track especially if you are not a regular DevOps.
I am currently in process of setting up a Jenkins CI system from scratch. I am looking for the best possible ways to get the Jenkins instance up and running. I have looked at options such as running from the JAR, setting it up a service, docker, blue ocean, etc.
I was wondering if you can please share your experience if there is a pre-configured setup or a scalable Jenkins solution already available in the market which is ready to be configured/deployed.
One of the key tenant on this Jenkins instance would be test automation guys running their Selenium tests (or I am ideally looking at Windows server installation although CentOS is an option) and would like to make it working for them as easy as possible.
Solution
I'm a Jenkins admin. In my company I've set up Jenkins on our Kubernetes cluster using the Helm chart with a custom docker image preloaded with plugins (you don't want to rely on the plugin update site during startup). All configuration is done with the Configuration as Code Plugin. We're using the Kubernetes plugin to do horizontally scaling. No builds are allowed on the build controller, everything is done within agents, which is custom docker images inspired by these images. and we don't allow no builds to run on the build controller. This works very well, and I'm very happy with the setup. There is also a Jenkins Kubernetes Operator which looks promising, but I havent tried it myself.
If you're not on Kubernetes, you can take a look at the Jenkins Evergreen project.
PS: The Blue Ocean project is dead, but the folks over at Cloudbees are currently in the process of overhauling the UX. They just released a weekly version where they got rid of all tables so the design is slowly becoming more and more responsive, and also a new set of icons is also coming up.
Answered By - Mats Faugli
Answer Checked By - David Goodson (JavaFixing Volunteer)
