What is Jenkins? / Everything you need to know about Jenkins

To integrate multiple stages of DevOps, (CI) continuous integration is simply the most significant part of the whole process. Talking about Jenkins, Jenkins is one of the most prominent and best DevOps tools to learn for integration in 2020. You must be curious to know about what is the main reason for Jenkins' popularity or what it really is, well if you actually are, this article is the place where you are going to get answers.

What really is Jenkins?


"It is an open-source modern automation tool which is written/developed in Java Language and has multiple plugins specifically designed for continuous integration". Developers need to develop, design, test multiple software and consistently integrate numerous changes in a specific project to make it a productive and easy-to-use tool for the users. Jenkins is the tool that can help the software designers in this regard as it is better than any automation tool in the market.
Jenkins has helped the organization to experiment, develop, design, and boost up the software development process. Jenkins integrates all the processes that are included in the development phase such as, building, documenting, testing, packaging, staging, deploying, statistical analysis and a lot more. Jenkins does that with the help of its advanced plugins.
These plugins integrate with multiple DevOps stages, and for the integration of any particular tool, you have to install the right plugin for it.

Jenkins benefits

There are multiple advantages of Jenkins, and some important ones are described below;

  1. An advanced open-source tool and has really good community support.
  2. Installation of Jenkins is pretty easy.
  3. With over 1000 plugins available, developing was never so easy before. If somehow a particular plugin is not there, you can code it up and then can share with the online community.
  4. It’s absolutely free of cost.
  5. It’s particularly built for Java and is also portable to many major platforms, probably all.

There are many reasons why Jenkins is better than any other integration platform that is available in the market right now. After reading this article and actually using it yourself, you will know the difference.
Some facts and key-metrics about Jenkins are described below,

  • Plugins: As said earlier, Jenkins has more than a thousand plugins that can integrate with almost any testing, deployment and development tool out there.
  • Adoption: With its over a Million users on a global level, with 150,000+ Installations, and easy access, Jenkins is famous and loved in the world of IT. 

Jenkins continuous Integration

Let's imagine, extensive and ultimate source code of an application is developed for testing on a test server. It seems like the best way of developing any software; however, the process is not that accurate. Let us explain step by step,

  • Developers usually have to wait until any developed software is waiting for final test results.
  • There are high chances that test results will bring out many bugs the developer didn’t expect. Then to improve the software, developers have to scan the whole source code of any particular tested application/software for the location and elimination of those bugs.
  • This ultimately slowdowns the delivery process for the tested software.
  • Consistent feedback related to coding, build failures, architectural problems, test results and file uploads went missing, and because of that, the overall quality and performance of the software can get lower the required standards.
  • The manual processes like these definitely increase the frequent risk failures.

So, you read the problems mentioned above and these problems not only lead to the late delivery of the software but also significantly lower the overall quality of a software. Definitely, such mishaps lead to customer dissatisfaction, and the overall brand value of your IT enterprise goes down, and competitors get the advantage. This is the time to overcome such issues smartly, and for that, there is an urgent need of a system where the developers can comfortably build, test and make changes in source code of their software in an advanced manner.
Developers can do it with a CI tool, and that is where Jenkins comes in like Superman. Jenkin is definitely the most advanced Continuous Integration tool in the Information Tech world.

Before Jenkins, complete source code was first developed and then tested. The whole process of finding bugs, then eliminating them was difficult as well as time-consuming. Developers have to wait a lot for test results as the process was manual.

After Jenkins, each commit that was made by developers in source code was built and tested consecutively. This increased efficiency, productivity and quality in the design of the software. Developers then knew test results for every commit they made for the source code of a developing software. All the developers had to do was to commit the changes for source code, and the rest of the process was automatically conducted by Jenkins.

Now that you have found the Gem that you were looking for, this is the time to learn or give Jenkins certification training to your developer employees. These are the top 17 resources that can help you learn Jenkins in an effective manner.

  1. Getting Started on Jenkins by Jenkins.io
  2. Jenkins Tutorial By Tutorials Point
  3. Jenkins Tutorial For Beginners By Guru99
  4. Continuous integration with Jenkins Tutorial
  5. Jenkins The Definitive Guide
  6. Jenkins Tutorial By Edureka
  7.  Step By Step Jenkins Tutorials For Starters
  8. Jenkins By DevOps Learning Portal
  9. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment By Microsoft
  10. Getting Started With Jenkins Continuous Integration by Jhon Sonmez
  11. Jenkins Introduction to Developer
  12. Maven Fundamentals by Bryan Hansen
  13. Build+Deploy+Test with Jenkins 2.0
  14. Getting Started With Jenkins: Key Concepts for Beginners
  15. CI and CD with AWS Codepipeline Jenkins and AWS code deploy --- Step by Step
  16. Robot Framework : Code management(GIT) + Jenkins Integration
  17. All Jenkins Video Tutorials that are available on YouTube

So, above are all the resources you or your employees need for Jenkins training and develop software that are going to be productive and highly profitable for your business in 2020.