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This is a guest post by R. Tyler Croy, who is a
long-time contributor to Jenkins and the primary contact for Jenkins project
infrastructure. He is also a Jenkins Evangelist at
CloudBees, Inc.
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I find the topic of "scaling Jenkins" to be incredibly interesting because,
more often than not, scaling Jenkins isn’t just about scaling a single instance
but rather scaling an organization and its continuous delivery processes. In
many cases when people talk about "scaling Jenkins" they’re talking about
"Jenkins as a Service" or "Continuous Delivery as a Service" which introduces a
much broader scope, and also more organization-specific requirements, to the
problem.
One of my favorite parts of a big conference like
Jenkins World is getting to
see how other people are solving similar problems at different organizations,
in essence:
"how
the sausage is made." This year’s Jenkins World will be no different, with a number
of sessions by developers and engineers from the companies leading the way,
scaling continuous delivery and Jenkins.
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Register for Jenkins World in
September with the code JWFOSS for a 20% discount off your pass.
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In the realm of "scaling Jenkins" the following sessions stand-out to me as
"must-attend" for those interested in the space:
September 14th 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM, Exhibit Hall A-1
NPR’s Digital Media team uses Jenkins to build, test and deploy code to various
staging and production environments. As the complexity of the software
components, environments and tests have grown - both generally and due to our
quest to achieve continuous deployment - management of Jenkins has become a
challenge. In this talk, we share information about our “JenkinsOps” effort
which has allowed us to automate many of the administrative tasks necessary to
manage feature code branches, handle deployments, run tests and configure our
environments properly.
— Paul Miles and Grant Dickie of NPR
September 15th 1:30 PM - 2:15 PM, Exhibit Hall C
At Riot Games, we build a lot of software. Come learn how we built an
integrated Docker solution using Jenkins that accepts Docker images submitted
as build environments by engineers around the company. Our containerized farm
now creates over 10,000 containers per week and handles nearly 1,000 jobs at a
rate of about 100 jobs per hour. All this is done with readily available, open
source Jenkins plugins. We’ll explore lessons learned, best practices and how
to scale and build your own system, as well as why we chose to solve the
problem this way…and whether or not we succeeded!
— Maxfield F Stewart of Riot Games
September 15th 2:30 PM - 3:15 PM, Great America J
In this talk, we’ll show how to use Jenkins Pipeline together with Docker and
Kubernetes to implement a complete end-to-end continuous delivery and
continuous improvement system for microservices and monolithic applications
using open source software. We’ll demonstrate how to easily create new
microservices projects or import existing projects, have them automatically
built, system and integration tested, staged and then deployed. Once deployed,
we will also see how to manage and update applications using continuous
delivery practices along with integrated ChatOps - all completely automated!
— James Strachan of Red Hat
September 15th 2:30 PM - 3:15 PM, Exhibit Hall C
The Jenkins platform can be dynamically scaled by using several Docker cluster
and orchestration platforms, using containers to run agents and jobs and also
isolating job execution. But which cluster technology should be used? Docker
Swarm? Apache Mesos? Kubernetes? How do they compare? All of them can be used
to dynamically run jobs inside containers. This talk will cover these main
container clusters, outlining the pros and cons of each, the current state of
the art of the technologies and Jenkins support. I believe people will be very
interested in learning about the multiple options available.
— Carlos Sanchez of CloudBees
September 15th 3:45 PM - 4:30 PM, Exhibit Hall C
How can we do it? We start with some real world results realized by Jenkins
users who have built large clusters and review how they got there. Next, we
will do experiments scaling some individual sub-components of Jenkins in
isolation and see what challenges we will face when integrated. The famous
large, distributed systems undoubtedly faced problems scaling - and we can
learn from them, too. The result will be recipes for building Jenkins
clusters with different scaling capabilities. After all of this, you can
build the biggest Jenkins cluster in the world…or maybe just make your own
Jenkins cluster more efficient.
— Stephen Connolly of CloudBees
September 15th 3:45 PM - 4:30 PM, Exhibit Hall A-1
This session will highlight how Splunk uses Jenkins to provide an end-to-end
solution in the development CI system. Attendees will see how test results are
delivered to a Splunk indexer, where they can be analyzed and presented in a
variety of ways. This session will also include a live demonstration.
— Bill Houston of Splunk
September 15th 4:45 PM - 5:30 PM, Exhibit Hall C
Last year, we presented our initial investigations and stress testing as we
prepared to deploy a large-scale Jenkins installation at Google. Now, with a
year of real-world use under our belts, we’ll discuss how our expectations held
up, what new issues we encountered and how we have addressed them.
— David Hoover of Google
In addition to these, we will also be hosting a
Jenkins World
Contributor Summit where "scaling" relevant topics such as "Storage
Pluggability" will be discussed.
The Jenkins World agenda is packed
with even more sessions, so it should be a very informational event for
everybody; hope to see you there!
