Jenkins on CentOS 10 Hardened
Continuous delivery has accelerated our build, test, and deployment workflows
What is our primary use case?
I have been using Jenkins on CentOS 10 for approximately seven to eight years.
My main use case for Jenkins on CentOS 10 is to run CI/CD pipelines.
To run my pipelines using Jenkins on CentOS 10, we have different applications where the whole build, test, deploy phase is run through pipelines, as well as other configuration that are applied to the applications.
I haven't observed anything truly unique in how we interact with Jenkins on CentOS 10 as I've seen more or less the same use case in other companies.
What is most valuable?
The best features Jenkins on CentOS 10 offers include many plugins that you can get from the community, so it's highly adjustable to the environment, supports multi-branch pipelines, has an architecture of primary and secondary servers for scaling up Jenkins that works really well when you have larger teams using it, and also has many native integrations with Git, Bitbucket and so on, making it excellent overall.
The plugin ecosystem and scalability of Jenkins on CentOS 10 have specifically helped my team because it's really beneficial when you can use additional secondary servers, and it scales well because of that; I use dozens of plugins for authentication, building role-based access control in larger teams and so on, as well as a bunch of pipeline improvements.
The plugins related to the integrations in Jenkins on CentOS 10 are crucial because many of them allow integrations with different systems.
Jenkins on CentOS 10 has positively impacted my organization by allowing our teams to build and deploy applications really fast, and because it has been around for many years, it's easy to find people with good knowledge in Jenkins who can immediately start contributing to the team without having to learn some new tool.
Deployments are at least eighty to ninety percent faster using Jenkins on CentOS 10 compared to scripting your way and developing your own tools, so the time saved is enormous as well as all the cost that comes with it, which otherwise equals additional cost in engineering time spent.
What needs improvement?
The plugins in Jenkins on CentOS 10, while really great because of the huge ecosystem, can also be a pain point because you never know how long they will be maintained, and there's a slight instability there; if you depend on some plugin that does an integration with some product and the plugin is not maintained anymore, you're blocked from using the product features that would integrate through the plugin, and it doesn't have high availability natively.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Jenkins on CentOS 10 for approximately seven to eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Jenkins on CentOS 10 is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Jenkins on CentOS 10 can scale well by adding additional servers.
How are customer service and support?
There is no customer support for Jenkins on CentOS 10 since it's open source.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I haven't switched from another solution, but I have used other solutions in parallel.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment in terms of time saved and money saved because of the time saved for engineers, but I don't have any specific data that I would be able to share.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
At some point, I evaluated CircleCI alongside Jenkins on CentOS 10.
What other advice do I have?
My advice for others looking into using Jenkins on CentOS 10 is that it costs nothing, so give it a try; I'm pretty sure you will find it easy to use. I don't believe there are any improvements needed for Jenkins on CentOS 10 that we haven't discussed yet.