Jenkins: Build great things at any scale

Aditya Raj
4 min readMar 12, 2021

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What is Jenkins ❓

Jenkins is an open-source tool build in java for continuous integration purposes. Jenkins manages and automates the complete lifecycle of the software development lifecycle including build, test, package, deployment, and much more.

We can configure Jenkins to watch for any change in the code on GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab and then automate the complete build process with help of tools like Maven and Gradel also we can integrate Jenkins with containers tools like Docker and Kubernetes.

With Jenkins, any organization can accelerate the software development process through automation. With the help of plugins, Jenkins can be integrated with almost all the tools.

Advantages of Jenkins ❗️

  • Jenkins is an open-source tool with huge community support.
  • Jenkins offers a plugin to integrate with almost all the tools.
  • It is written in java so it can be used on any platform.
  • Jenkins is absolutely free of cost.

History of Jenkins 📜

The Jenkins project was started in 2004 by Kohsuke Kawaguchi originally called Hudson while he was working at Sun Microsystems. Kohsuke was a developer at Sun Microsystems and he got tired of the anger of his team every time his code broke the build. So he decided to find some way so that he can perform continuous integration to test his code before do the actual commit to the repository. Then his teammates also started using it and soon Kohsuke open-sourced it and create the Jenkins project and soon Jenkins usages had spread across the world.

Use Cases of Jenkins 🖥️

🔴 Preply’s online education platform with CI/CD

Preply is an online educational platform that pairs students with private tutors remotely via online chat. It features a ranking algorithm that uses machine learning for the classification and recommendation of tutors.

To support this online education platform and over 100,000 students and 25,000 tutors. Preply’s engineering team set out to create a fully automated CI/CD process for its software and development projects.

The challenge was to maintain their “everything as a code” mantra and enhance their current Jenkins installation. They wanted to eliminate manual intervention by using a configuration-as-a-code solution for all software development.

They came up with a solution if a flexible and scalable CI/CD pipeline that enables their team to introduce and accelerate the development of new builds without jeopardizing the entire service.

As a result, their daily release rate increased from 1 to 40 and is still growing. Rollback time decreased from 45 minutes to 60–120 seconds. Also, deployment time reduced from 90 to 5–40 minutes depending on service and user experience improved drastically.

🔴 Tymit — Fintech Innovation With A Jenkins Backbone

Tymit is a revolutionary credit card processing company. The idea behind Tymit began when two brothers, Martin and Nicolas Magnone, thought there should be a better long-term way to manage finances than relying on credit cards or loans. The pair felt that credit cards often have unclear pricing, lots of fees, and a lack of features to help keep balances under control. The Mangone's were convinced that they could leverage the latest payment technology to offer much better customer experiences.

The challenge was to create a solidly reliable CI/CD platform that provides the technology team with the agility and the flexibility needed to innovate while ensuring the security and scalability their fintech service requires.

Tymit leveraged Jenkins to build a compliant, transparent, and secure mode DevOps platform to drive product innovation, handle the instant financial transaction,s and support thousands of users in real-time.

As a result, Tymit achieved faster delivery of mobile, microservices, and operational services also the software testing and release cycle reduced by 50%. They have no ability to support thousands of users for real-time transactions and create a secure, controlled, and compliant fintech environment.

🔴 Gainsight — humanizing the customer experience with the DevSecOps platform

Gainsight is a leading customer success platform provider, chose to humanize the customer experience with innovative technology. Gainsight helps customer success, post-sales, and product teams put customers at the heart of their business to deliver better outcomes and grow net dollar retention (NDR).

The challenge was to maintain an infrastructure-as-code approach while integrating various tools and programming languages within the platform, all while securing processes with better visibility and air-tight quality control.

They have developed a flexible and scalable DevSecOps infrastructure that provides Gainsight with keener operational insight, ease of collaboration, and the ability to accelerate releases to stay a step ahead of the competition.

As a result their infrastructure costs reduced by 40%, builds are 30% faster. Communication becomes better and more seamless in builds and releases. Their 95% of the infrastructure is scalable with code and no more manual process.

Thank You 🤓

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Aditya Raj

I'm passionate learner diving into the concepts of computing 💻