What the butler saw: Windows developers getting friendly with Jenkins and open source

Microsoft's move to embrace open source technologies has made their users more open to adopting tools like Jenkins, says Tyler Croy

Version 2.0 of Jenkins, the open source automation server and continuous delivery software development platform, was released last week, a decade after it began life as Hudson, a Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) project.

With the rising popularity of DevOps as a software development and delivery methodology, its community has been focused on making Jenkins easier to use, support delivery pipelines as code, and making it simpler to select and manage the many plugins that are a central part of the Jenkins ecosystem. These changes, the developers insist, are sufficiently large to merit a new version badge - although they are keen to point out that version 2.0 is completely backwards compatible with earlier iterations.

Tyler Croy, Jenkins community lead and independent consultant to CloudBees (a commercial distributor of Jenkins), spoke to Computing about DevOps and the role of Jenkins within it. First, do more companies that develop software understand the benefits of continuous integration (CI) and how many of them are taking it all the way to continuous delivery now?

"It's not at 100 per cent but continuous integration is close behind concepts like source control in that it is viewed by most as a foundational part of so-called proper software development like source control," said Croy.

"Many companies are realising the benefits of continuous delivery, striving to ensure their software is tested and ready to be delivered after each change," he went on.

"Many of those organisations adopt Jenkins to automate much of their delivery process, extending their existing continuous integration tooling, giving them the benefits of reduced risk, more efficiency and higher quality that continuous delivery ensures."

The pipeline-as-code feature in Jenkins 2.0 is a definite push in the direction of enabling continuous delivery, Croy went on.

"With 2.0 the concept of a pipeline becomes much more central to Jenkins, which opens the door a world of possibilities."

Last year, Computing's DevOps research discovered that the tool most used by practitioners is Microsoft Visual Studio, which was mentioned by 35 per cent of those polled (Jenkins was at 16 per cent). Since so many developers are obviously using Microsoft's platforms, should the ease of use efforts be directed towards Windows users too? A look at the Jenkins forums suggests that it is not as easy to install as on Linux or Mac OS?

"I'm not sure it's harder to install on Windows than on Mac OS X, though admittedly Linux is the easiest to install: ‘docker pull jenkins' is pretty unbeatable," Croy said.

"Jenkins has had good Windows ecosystem support, with Powershell, MSBuild and other well-maintained Windows-platform-specific plugins."

He continued: "What I find most interesting about Jenkins and Windows is not really Jenkins specific, but the recent trend by Microsoft to embrace numerous open source technologies has made their users more open to adopting tools like Jenkins... it's exciting to see Windows developers joining in!"

As Jenkins becomes easier to deploy, will it undermine the business model of CloudBees? Croy doesn't think so, pointing out that CloudBees' focus is Jenkins-as-a-service in enterprise.

"Jenkins is really easy to get started with on a local workstation but doesn't always have those advanced features that enterprises really want like role-based access control, multiple-master management and so on," he said.

Find out what is going on in enterprise software development at the ComputingDevOps Summit in July, during which our latest research will be unveiled.