Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu 24.04 with Support

My main use case for Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is to manage the CI/CD pipeline of my application where it will automate the complete CI and CD deployment.

A specific example of how I use Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu for my CI/CD pipeline is with an application where it needs some integration that we need to build the application using Docker and we need to deploy the same application onto the Kubernetes cluster. We have some Docker containers which are running with Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu installed, and we have mounted that volume to the local Ubuntu server. If something happens to the container, there will be no issue with the data loss as we can recreate the container and attach the same volume to the container which has Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu, ensuring no data loss. Once Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is installed on the container, I access it through the UI and manage the complete pipeline, which includes all stages, such as getting the code from the GitHub repository. We use Maven as my application is Java-based, allowing us to build the code and perform unit tests. Once we have the Maven artifact ready, we use the same WAR file to create an image using Docker. After creating the Docker image, we push it to the ECR repository on the AWS container registry. Once we have the container image available, it is pushed to the Kubernetes cluster using Argo CD deployment, and the same image runs on the Kubernetes clusters.

The best features Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu offers include performance, where I can access the Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu UI with no load time and no latency.

Good performance and no latency positively impact my day-to-day work as the Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu application can be accessed quickly.

Additionally, we have security features in Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu where I use the credentials feature to keep secure credentials or passwords instead of hardcoding them in the pipeline.

Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu positively impacts my organization by helping in automating the CI/CD workflows.

With Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu automating the CI/CD process, it eliminates issues encountered with manual deployment, saving time and reducing errors.

Improvements needed for Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu include keeping the OS fully patched with the latest security updates, minimizing installed packages, and removing unused services. I suggest restricting SSH, disabling password authentication, using SSH keys, and allowing access only to permitted users while disabling root logins. It would also be good to use HTTPS instead of HTTP for enhanced security, implement authentication methods such as LDAP, Active Directory, OAuth, or SAML, and enable MFA. Moreover, I recommend using RBAC for authorization to provide limited permissions only to certain roles. It is important to manage plugins by removing unused ones and installing those from trusted sources only, along with using secret management tools like HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager. Additionally, limiting network access to VPNs, whitelisting specific IPs, and monitoring for login failures and plugin installations can enhance security. Backup processes should include credentials, job definitions, and plugins, and overall, we should have robust production deployments featuring NGINX reverse proxy with HTTPS, centralized logging, daily backups, and tested recovery procedures, along with vulnerability scanning.

I have been using Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu for almost three plus years.

Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is stable in my experience.

Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu's scalability is effective with its controller and agent architecture.

Customer support for Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is accessed through AWS support if issues arise with the server or EC2 instances, and my experience with them has been positive as they provide solutions when needed.

I did not use a different solution before Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu.

I have seen a return on investment with Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu as it saves on licensing costs, runs efficiently on various hardware, and long-term support releases reduce the frequency of major upgrades. Automation tools help reduce administration efforts, and using cloud images enables fast provisioning, while standardized deployments decrease configuration time. In addition, large software repositories simplify application installations and long-term support releases provide a stable platform, thereby lowering maintenance effort. This results in reduced operational costs through lower licensing expenses.

My experience with pricing includes considering infrastructure costs such as servers, instances, GPUs, storage, and networking, and potentially operating system support like Ubuntu Pro. I account for AI software or model licensing, implementation effort, ongoing operations, monitoring security tools, and training for support. I calculate the total cost of ownership over three to five years, and factors affecting AI solutions on Ubuntu include CPU or GPU, storage, networking, the number of users accessing it, support levels, and software licensing, along with understanding cloud versus on-premises deployment and maintenance costs.

I did not evaluate any other options before choosing Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu.

Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is utilized for CI/CD processing, and we manage more than 50 different projects. Each project requires different pipeline procedures and different requirements. We organize our product project pipeline process in Jenkins for web applications, mobile applications, and security checks and testing procedures. We manage our whole infrastructure, continuous integration, and delivery process in Jenkins.

We need Ubuntu hardened images most of the time because we chose Ubuntu. The same process and procedure could be applied regardless of the distribution chosen. Our hardened Ubuntu step operates in AWS. In our images, we need to maintain current security at the kernel and app level. We also require fast opening time and fast build time. If we do not use a package, we do not include it. We run hardening steps every time as an automatic build process. We use Jenkins in the Ubuntu hardening process, which is very important for us. For example, we run Ubuntu hardening images automatically every week. Our pipeline downloads the latest Ubuntu image and runs required tools, then executes hardened steps with Ansible. We use Ansible for the hardening steps. When the tasks are finished, we verify that everything is functioning correctly. Then we upload the AMI to our library for use in new deployments.

Regarding governance and security for Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu, I can share details about the Ubuntu hardening side. Requirements sometimes change, and we can close every unnecessary tool and service. In the security steps, we can close their ports, use bastion hosts, or if using the cloud, allow access to the server in different ways. For Jenkins, we can block root access. We can also use RBAC.

Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu can be improved, but for my business, it is very stable and very useful. Both the Ubuntu and Jenkins processes probably need improvements and steps for specific people and specific companies, but that is acceptable for my needs. Currently, there is no need for any improvements for my organization, though improvements could potentially exist for others.

The best features Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu offers are the ability to add specific steps. This is important for us and also important for the entire sector. When performing a CI/CD process, we sometimes need specific steps and specific tasks, such as running Ansible or performing checks beforehand that require specific access. Jenkins operates on our own infrastructure privately, which is more secure for us. When Jenkins finishes its job, we can securely upload to our image gallery, which is the best feature for us.

The use of Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu impacts my team's efficiency positively because it is more reliable since other options block us at specific points. We need specific, unique image tags. In our infrastructure, which we have been managing for over seven years, we need specific requirements. We chose Jenkins because it is more flexible and more reliable for specific tasks. We can accomplish everything when we need unique tasks and are not blocked by tool-related problems.

Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu has positively impacted my organization because we need to maintain current security in sensitive areas. We run our hardened Ubuntu process every week because new security issues emerge weekly. We must check for vulnerabilities and harden our Ubuntu images because all our products use Ubuntu. The most important point for us is keeping our Ubuntu images up-to-date and hardened at all times. Additionally, this hardening process must be an automatic process, which Jenkins provides for us.

Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu can be improved, but for my business, it is very stable and very useful. Both the Ubuntu and Jenkins processes probably need improvements and steps for specific people and specific companies, but that is acceptable for my needs. Currently, there is no need for any improvements for my organization, though improvements could potentially exist for others.

We have used Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu for ten years, but sometimes we use other options. We always return to using Jenkins because it is good for us.

Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is stable in my experience.

The scalability of Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is good because they are very scalable products. We do not need scalability for the Jenkins side because we understand our tasks and our Jenkins setup is very clear, with no need to scale since we know our loads. On the Ubuntu side, we can achieve scalability.

Customer support for Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is not needed as we are using community versions. We find experiences on community sites, which is acceptable for us.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu because I have experience with both Jenkins and Ubuntu. We chose it directly based on our own experience without needing to reinvent the wheel.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is that it is not too much and is affordable for us.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is that it is not too much and is affordable for us.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is that configuration is easy in Jenkins, and it has extendibility and flexibility. On the hardened Ubuntu side, the community is very powerful and can provide very good hardening solutions. I chose the rating of ten for Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu because I am still using Jenkins after seven years, and the hardened Ubuntu part includes our critical steps. Both Jenkins and Ubuntu fix our very major, critical problems. We have set up a very critical infrastructure with both Jenkins and the Ubuntu hardening steps without any need for specific challenges. We are satisfied working with Jenkins and Ubuntu.

My main use case for Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is to build out some of our hardened Docker images used by the different product teams. For that contract, I worked as a platform engineer and essentially what we did was standardize the entire process by which teams or the product teams can leverage images and use it as a base image to build out their own application image to ensure that it is as secure as possible and is also fitted with all the things that are required for the application to run within our client's environments, which includes things like proxy, specific tools that the application might require, and different languages. I mostly also use it to create smoke tests for our re-roll process.

Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu helped me manage and automate those image builds by allowing us to set up a process to build out our hardened images used by our Elastic Container Service on AWS. In fact, towards the end of when I joined that program, we were having to migrate from that Jenkins environment to Harness, but while we were still working on Jenkins, we had set up a process where we built out our hardened images that get security updates every week. We try to rebuild them once a week and push out that image to all our Elastic Container instances across the different production. There was a process that Jenkins helped us handle, which we call the re-roll process, which essentially just rotates the images, updating the Amazon Machine Images behind the Elastic Container Service instances. We update those images and then try to restart the different product teams' clusters with those updated images to ensure that we have the latest security patch. Jenkins being on a hardened image itself allowed us to safely push out our own hardened images for our Elastic Container service automatically, and teams could easily be assured that whatever gets rolled out at the start of a new week contains the latest security updates and patches that get fixed almost immediately.

The best features Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu offers include its strong emphasis on security. It allows you to receive your security updates as quickly as possible, and that is the major thing.

Besides the security and quick updates, I found that it was easier to run parallel jobs on Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu. The way it handles parallel jobs is much smoother than what you would normally have. That stood out to me as a particularly valuable feature.

Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu has positively impacted my organization by increasing deployment times. The number of deployments that we had increased from around twenty deployments a day to more than double that. It was easier to retry on failure; if anything failed within the automated pipelines, it was easy to retry.

I wish it had a more friendly user interface. I am not entirely sure why the client required us to switch from Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu to Harness, but I can honestly say I have had some experience with Harness.

I have been using Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu for about two years in a contract I worked on previously.

Jenkins really served well. It was able to handle concurrency effectively, allowing us to run multiple jobs without running into state errors. For example, when we were using Packer to build out our AMIs on Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu, it ran smoothly. Jenkins could handle spinning up multiple parallel jobs better than Harness; Harness tended to run into errors because one job was already running that process. Additionally, on Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu, it was easier to have a retry mechanism; when a job failed and needed to retry, it ran through the entire logic of the current job instead of having issues with other tools.

Towards the end of that contract we were migrating from Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu to Harness due to CloudBees Jenkins support issues.

I do not have specific numbers or metrics on time saved, error reduction, or other improvements that I noticed after adopting Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu.

I have not worked with the AI capabilities of Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu.

I do not know if we purchased Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu through the AWS Marketplace.

My advice for others looking into using Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu is to consider if it meets their project requirements and cost requirements. If it does, then obviously go for it, as it offers all the capabilities needed to have a secure platform to run automated pipelines, CI/CD pipelines, and other related tools.

I do not have any additional thoughts about Jenkins on Hardened Ubuntu before we wrap up.

I would rate this product a seven out of ten.