News About Jenkins X on JayeX - Cloud Native CI/CD Built On Kubernetes

JayeX Most Valuable Contributor 2026 🏆

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Continuous Delivery Foundation gives awards to recognize all the work that makes this community and the progress of Continuous Delivery possible.

Vote on someone for the award for JayeX Most Valuable Contributor 2026

This award recognizes excellence of technical contributions to JayeX. This individual commits key pieces to projects and, more importantly, contributes in a way that benefits the project neutrally as a whole.

You vote by someone by adding a thumbs on the comment with their name in this issue. Voting is now open and will close on Tuesday, May 5, 2026.

Jenkins X changes name to JayeX!

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Background

During the early days of Jenkins X the Jenkins part of the name made sense for two reasons: Jenkins was used as the main pipeline engine and the development was done within CloudBees, the company that also is the main developer of Jenkins.

Why change?

Nowadays the Jenkins X name is more of a burden than boon marketing wise: It attracts people interested in Jenkins, who will dissapointed. It detracts people that are looking for an alternative to Jenkins, who might actually find what this project offers attractive.

JayeX Most Valuable Contributor 2026 🏆

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Continuous Delivery Foundation gives awards to recognize all the work that makes this community and the progress of Continuous Delivery possible.

Nominate someone to the award for JayeX Most Valuable Contributor 2026

You nominate people by adding a comment with their name in this issue. Nominations are now open and will close on Thursday, April 2, 2026

Migrate to Google Artifact Registry

Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Google has announced that container registry will be shut down some time after March 18, 2025. For GKE clusters created with version 1.12.0 or later of terraform-google-jx it’s unlikely that anything needs to be done, but for older clusters you should upgrade your cluster while considering our advice regarding migration from container registry to artifact registry.

If you are using a Google Service Account to run terraform you need to add the role requirement roles/artifactregistry.admin. See our guide regarding Google Service Account for details.

Improve your changelogs

Wed, 24 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Background

A standard part of the Jenkins X pipelines since a long time is the execution of jx changelog create that takes the commit messages between the release currently being created and the previous one and creates a change log from these. The change log is then stored as a release note in GitHub or other git provider.

During the last year some improvements have landed in various Jenkins X components to improve the changelogs and their usefulness. So I’ll take this opportunity to describe these improvements and also in general give hints to how to get useful changelogs.

Reconcile with kpt live apply

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Since the dawn of Jenkins X 3 the default last step of reconciling the state of the files in your cluster repository to your cluster has been to execute kubectl apply. You can find more details about this here.

There are some drawbacks with kubectl apply though. The one that made me start looking for alternatives was that if you remove a resource from your cluster repository it may not be removed from your cluster. The way deletion works with kubectl apply is that it is handed the option --prune which will remove resources that are not in the manifests. Except that it doesn’t always work as expected. It will only remove certain kinds of resources defined in kubectl. In my case I removed an HorizontalPodAutoscaler from my cluster repository, but it wasn’t removed from my cluster.

Foreign aliases

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Background

In an organisation with many repositories and developers that are frequently shifting the maintenance of OWNERS and OWNERS_ALIASES files can be tedious. In the passing year a couple of functionalities has been added to help with this.

Foreign aliases

To avoid maintaining the OWNERS_ALIASES file in many repositories you can now refer to the OWNERS_ALIASES file in another repository. In the Jenkins X project we have the main OWNERS_ALIASES file in the jx-community repository. So in the jx repository the OWNERS_ALIASES file only looks like this:

Project ideas for Google Summer of Code 2023 ☀️

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We have put together some project ideas as part of our application to participate in the Google Summer of Code 2023 program.

1. CD events integration with Jenkins X

Description

The cdEvents project standardises the way systems talk to each other, which enables Interoperability between systems so they speak a common language through the cdEvents spec in the event. Creating a capability in Jenkins X that can receive and sent a cdEvent would benefit the project and the DevOps ecosystem in general, by stopping glue code used to integrate systems and power innovation by letting end users swap out tools with no effort.

GSoC 2022 Final Report: Building Jenkins X UI

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Jenkins X New UI

It is a web application built with Golang for the backend and Sveltekit for the frontend, both of which are built together and used in the same container. To function properly, it must be installed as a helm chart with Jenkins X CRDs.

🌟 It has light and dark themes.

Why need a new UI?

A good UI is essential for a CI/CD tool, as not everyone is familiar with the CLI. The current UI (jx-pipeline-visualizer) is a read-only UI, the user can view the logs of PipelineActivity but neither can start nor stop the pipeline.

GSoC 2022 Final Report: Improving Supply Chain Security

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Project Description

Supply chain security is a rising concern in the current software era. Securing the software supply chain encompasses vulnerability remediation and the implementation of controls throughout the software development process. Due to massive increase in attacks on software supply chain and the diversity of its types, Jenkins X has to make efforts to ensure that the build process is secure. As part of securing Jenkins X installation by default I worked on both securing our own components and enabling our users to use these features in their build and release steps..

Hacktoberfest 2022

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce that Jenkins X will be participating in Hacktoberfest again this year! Hacktoberfest is a month-long global celebration of open source software.

All backgrounds and skill levels are encouraged to participate in Hacktoberfest and join a global community of open source contributors.

Learn more about Hacktoberfest and sign up here.

Contribute to Jenkins X

We welcome your contributions to the Jenkins X project!

Issues labelled “hacktoberfest” generally indicate good first issues. However, all pull requests will count towards your Hacktoberfest challenge.

Introduction to Software Bill Of Materials

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Before going through Software Bill Of Materials (SBOMs), we need to set the ground for a rising concern in the software industry which is Software Supply Chain Security. Like traditional industries, deploying a piece of a software artifact goes through multiple stages composed of collecting source code components, libraries, tools, and processes used in those stages.

Software Bill Of Materials Formats

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Prerequisite

If you don’t understand what is Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), please read this blog post first.

Different SBOM formats comparison

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in the U.S. defined minimum requirements for SBOM formats:

Identifying the supplier of the software component.
Identifying the details about the version of the component.
Including unique identifiers for the component like cryptographic hash functions.
Including the relationships between all dependencies inside the component.
Including a timestamp of when and by whom the SBOM report was created or last modified

In this section, we discuss different kinds and formats for SBOM standards and make a brief comparison between them. Three commonly used standards achieved the NTIA minimum requirements for SBOM generation and each one results in a different final SBOM document.

Software Bill Of Materials generation tools

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Prerequisite

Before you read this, you have to understand what are SBOMs and what are different formats of SBOMs

Different SBOM generation tools comparison

If you got this far, you already realize the importance of SBOM generation, and also it should meet certain requirements to achieve its purpose. Due to various requirements depending on what standard you’re following, there has to be a way to automatically generate different output formats for different standards. Also, it has to be suited for ci/cd solutions to keep up with the increasing number of releases for each organization.

GSoC 2022 Community Bonding Period with Jenkins X

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Hello everyone, I am Rajat Gupta, pursuing my bachelor’s in Information Technology. In 2022, I have been selected as a student developer in Google Summer of Code under Jenkins X. We will be building a new UI for Jenkins X. I got this news on May 20th, as I received an email from google.

How I started

The technologies needed were Golang, Kubernetes, and GitOps. I used golang only once before, while linting Jenkins X codebase, I only used Kubernetes once before while setting up a k3s cluster to run Jenkins X pipelines. These tasks were necessary to do for all GSoC participants. Apart from that, I was a total beginner.

Kubernetes 1.22 - Breaking change!

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

To allow Jenkins X to support Kubernetes 1.22, we had to update our version of Tekton. This updated version of Tekton contains breaking changes that has consequences if you made your own custom Jenkins X pipelines.

To make sure that your custom pipelines continue to work after this upgrade, you must edit the resource settings in your pipelines. Otherwise your pipelines will most likely not be able to start at all, or if they do, consume a lot of resources.

Google Summer of Code 2022 project proposal template ☀️

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Proposal template

1. Contact details

Full name:
Country:
Time zone:
Email:
Github ID:
Personal blog (optional):
Twitter/LinkedIn/others:

2. GSOC information

Have you participated in the Google Summer of Code previously? Please describe your experience.
Are you applying to any other organizations this year? If so, please list them.
How many hours will you devote to your GSoC project each week? Do you have any other commitments during the summer?
Have you ever contributed code to Jenkins X? If you have, post the Pull Request (PR) links (It’s ok if they have not been merged/approved yet)
Do you plan on contributing to the Jenkins X project after GSoC is finished?
Were you able to install Jenkins X locally on your laptop?
- If no, please explain why (Unsupported architecture, missing documentation, time constraints etc)?
- If yes, how was the installation experience (missing documentation, complexity etc)?
Have you used kubernetes in the past? Please provide a brief description and if possible links to the work.
Have you used golang in the past? Please provide a brief description and if possible some code samples.
(If you are interested in the UI project) Have you worked with a frontend framework/library in the past? Please provide a brief description and if possible some code samples.

3. Project idea

Repeat this section for as many project ideas as you want (Go in the order most likely to least likely).

Project proposal for Google Season of Docs 2022 📄

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We have put together a project proposal as part of our application to participate in the Google Season of Docs 2022 program.

Project proposal

Better documentation for real world use cases - Jenkins X

About us

Jenkins X provides automated CI/CD for Kubernetes with Preview Environments on Pull Requests using Cloud Native pipelines from Tekton.

Problem

End users of Jenkins X are unable to find information on how to use Jenkins X for real world use cases which includes:
- Production best practices
- Scanning images in Jenkins X pipelines
- How to make your app use different configuration/secrets for each environment
- Observability for your apps, logging, metrics, tracing
- Tests (Integration, e2e)
- Artifact management
- Multi cluster
- Integration with other tools in the cloud native sector

Project scope

Audit the current Jenkins X documentation and create a friction log
Use the friction log as a guide for understanding the gaps in the documentation
Interact with the Jenkins X community to create a list of top use cases
- Create a survey
- Look at the github issues and slack messages
Work with the volunteers to incorporate those changes into the documentation
Establish a feedback loop (the target customers are the end users of Jenkins X) to improve the documentation

Measuring project success

Decrease in the number of github issues raised by end users on documentation related to common real world use cases
Short 1-2 minute videos on common tasks that end users of Jenkins X would like to perform.

Recommended skills

Must have:
- Experience with github
- Communication skills to work with the Jenkins X community
- Creating online surveys
Nice to have:
- Basic experience with docker compose (local development scripts use compose)
- Good video editing skills.
- Some knowledge working with the documentation of other tools in the kubernetes ecosystem

Mentors/Volunteers

Timeline

The project will take roughly 6 months to complete. Once the technical writer is selected, we will do an orientation to bring him up to speed. This is the timeline we have in mind, but we are flexible.

Google Summer of Code 2022 ☀️

Sat, 12 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Project proposal template can be found here.

We are very happy to announce that Jenkins X has been selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2022!

If you are new to GSoC and want to learn more about it, check out their new site. You can find the list of project ideas from Jenkins X here. If you are interested in applying to Jenkins X, please check the timeline. Apply as early as possible.

Project ideas for Google Summer of Code 2022 ☀️

Sun, 20 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Note

Jenkins X has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2022 program, take a look at the follow up blog.

Project proposal template can be found here.

We have put together some project ideas as part of our application to participate in the Google Summer of Code 2022 program.

1. Cloud events integration with Jenkins X

Description

The only way to trigger jobs/workflows in Jenkins X at the moment is by listening to events from Source Control Management (SCM) providers like github, gitlab, bitbucket, however it would be nice to listen to other event sources and trigger jobs/pipelines in Jenkins X. One interesting application would be to trigger some Jenkins X job in response to some alerting event (pagerduty, opsgenie). As a start we should focus on (emitting and listening to) cloudevents which define a common format for events produced from different sources. This will also help make Jenkins X compatible with other platforms.

Jenkins X Survey Result Details

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

For more information on the Jenkins X survey see Survey results Some highlights from the free text answers.

What do you enjoy the most with Jenkins X?

KUBERNETES

Cloud-native feel, “you know Kubernetes, you know how to use JX”, plugins-based architecture
Complete CI/CD platform in a k8s cluster

GIT/CHAT/OPS/CONFIGURABILITY

Configuration as code, auto generation of k8s files, flexibility
easy to create preview/dev/staging/prod environments.
modularity and ease to extend/change

EASY

Everything works out of the box.
Very intuitive
Lightweight and easy to manage.

COMMUNITY

The community is incredible. I really like how everything works together.
love the community.

VARIOUS

scalability and how fast it is!
Integration with different secret backends is easy. Also love the community.
It’s opinionated
No vendor lock in

What do you believe should be improved with Jenkins X?

ON PREMISE

run it against a local running cluster to test changes to Jenkins-X before updated in GitHub.

Jenkins X Survey Results

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Jenkins X survey was active for four weeks and closed on February 11 2022. We received lots of valuable insights into how people are using Jenkins X. We need more contributors in the Jenkins X community, so if you feel strongly about how Jenkins X should evolve, your best bet is to dive in and get your hands dirty:) Some highlights of the free text responses we got are collected here

January 2022 updates from the JX community

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Happy new year 2022!

This monthly blog post series is an attempt to showcase all the incredible work being done by the Jenkins X community to the wider audience.

Lot of exciting features, bug fixes and documentation improvements were made.

Community effort

We restarted the office hours this month (https://jayex.io/community/#office-hours). Drop by to say hello, we are a friendly group!
First Jenkins X survey was also created this month (https://jayex.io/blog/2022/01/21/survey-1-2022/). We have extended the deadline by 2 weeks (Feb 11, 2022 midnight UTC), so fill it out if you have not yet. We will use this for the roadmap moving forward.
Monthly blog post update series to keep up with all the amazing progress.

Features

jx-plugins/jx-gitops:
- Cron job to delete old boot jobs
- Option to Keep n boot jobs older than default age
jenkins-x/lighthouse:
- Support for using gitlab nested repositories
- Allow running lighthouse with cluster scoped permissions
- Add a flag to keep polling releases until commit status is successful
- Do not include tekton roles when tekton engine is disabled
jx-plugins/jx-pipeline:
- Use pager to aid in visualizing long pipeline logs
jenkins-x-terraform/terraform-jx-azure
- Support provisioning spot instances in the azure terraform jx module
jx-plugins/jx-verify:
- Support specifying label for jx verify install
jenkins-x-plugins/jx-registry:
- Support adding ECR registry policy using jx-registry
jenkins-x-charts/jxboot-helmfile-resources:
- Make all storage locations available as envrironment variables

Bug fixes

GoogleContainerTools/kaniko (upstream fix - outside jx codebase):
- Kaniko in jx pipelines can now push to ACR (Azure Container Registry)
jenkins-x/terraform-aws-eks-jx:
- Remove deprecated jx v2 keys from requirements configmap
- Fix issue with on-demand billing mode of dynamodb
jenkins-x-plugins/jx-promote:
- Fix local chart check when using cloud buckets to store helm charts
jenkins-x-plugins/jx-project:
- Fix jx project rendering invalid chart.yaml files on import for custom packs in catalog

Documentation improvement

Guides on configuring Azure service principle and GCP service account for terraform users (https://jayex.io/v3/admin/platforms/azure/svc_principal/ and https://jayex.io/v3/admin/platforms/google/svc_acct/)
New section showing current Jenkins X users (https://jayex.io/#users)
New section on learning resources for Jenkins X v3 (https://jayex.io/v3/learning-resources/)
Improved documentation on setting up Jenkins X v3 on AWS EKS (https://jayex.io/v3/admin/platforms/eks/)
Improved guide on installing and configuring Jenkins X on k3s (https://jayex.io/v3/admin/platforms/k3s/)
Fixed content getting clipped in mobile view

Plumbing/Quality improvements

jenkins-x/jx:
- Disable running github actions on forks
jenkins-x/jx-docs:
- Upgrade docsy submodules
- Upgrade hugo docker image
- Migrate jx-docs to new pipeline format
jenkins-x/jx-gitops:
- upgrade kubectl version for kpt
- upgrade helm and helmfile version

Huge thanks to all the contributors for their hardwork!

Jenkins X Survey

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We have made a short survey where we try to gain insight into how people experience Jenkins X. This is meant to be used as guidelines going forward so we can be more focused on what areas to improve.

All contributions are welcome, if you are just browsing or have used it for years, we want to know you all!

We have extended the survey period and it will now be open untill Tuesday February 11 2022 midnight UTC. All submissions are anonymous and the results will be published. So don’t hesitate, fill in the Jenkins X survey today

Incident: Kaniko and ACR

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve recently had an issue with one of our packages come to light. We wanted to talk through the resolution steps we’re going to put into place.

So what happened?

Azure users started reporting seeing the following error within the build step:

error checking push permissions -- make sure you entered the correct tag name, and that you are authenticated correctly, and try again: checking push permission for "xyz.azurecr.io/myorg/myrepo:0.0.1": resolving authorization for xyz.azurecr.io failed: error getting credentials - err: exec: "docker-credential-acr-env": executable file not found in $PATH

This seemed to be indicating to an authorization issues with the terraform module. Other users were seemingly unaffected by this issue.

Hacktoberfest conclusion 2021

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hacktoberfest 2021 is over, and we got quite a few contributions from the open source community.

Contributions included various document improvements, adding jira as an issue tracker for generating changelogs and adding initial support for external vault!

The top contributors to Jenkins X in hacktoberfest 2021 were:

Marten Svantesson
Christopher vig
James Rawlings
Hays Clark
Anatoli Babenia

We would also like to thank all the contributors who participated and made it a success. The strength of Jenkins X lies in it’s vast community, and we hope to see many more major contributions from them in the near and far future.

Hacktoberfest 2021

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce that Jenkins X will be participating in Hacktoberfest again this year! Hacktoberfest is a month-long global celebration of open source software.

All backgrounds and skill levels are encouraged to participate in Hacktoberfest and join a global community of open source contributors.

Learn more about Hacktoberfest and sign up here.

Contribute to Jenkins X docs

We welcome your contributions to the Jenkins X documentation project!

Issues labelled “hacktoberfest” generally indicate good first issues. However, all pull requests will count towards your Hacktoberfest challenge.

Moving Jenkins X v2 artifacts

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

ACTION REQUIRED

TL;DR - Jenkins X specific helm repositories and container registries hosted on GCP have been moved to GitHub. This will mainly affect jx v2 users but there is expected to be a small impact on v3 users too. Below describes the steps we believe are needed to keep Jenkins X installations working as normal but there will be some action needed.

Why the disruption?

When Jenkins X first started we made heavy use of GCP’s services for hosting the cloud infrastructure needed by users to install and run Jenkins X. This was great as we could use the same IAM to push and maintain content from our own hosted build infrastructure and ensure we were validating the same experience of using cloud provider hosted services wherever possible. As Jenkins X grew in popularity the cloud costs began to increase with the pricing model from GCP, specifically the networking costs of cross continent egress.

How to debug your Tekton pipelines

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

TaskRun breakpoint functionality is no longer supported since Tekton 0.29.0 upgrades in 3.2.298

For more info see Kubernetes 1.22 - Breaking change!.

Tekton recently introduced a debug feature when you create TaskRun resources so that steps can be paused at a breakpoint until told to move forwards so that you can diagnose why pipeline steps fail.

The latest Tekton release only supports breakpoints on TaskRun resources but there is a Pull Request #4145 to add support also to debugging PipelineRun resources as well. If you are reading this please add your thumbs up emoji feedback to the PR #4145

How to use GitOps and Kubernetes External Secrets for better audit and security

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

So GitOps is a cool approach to managing kubernetes resources in a cluster, by checking in the source code for:

the kubernetes YAMLs
details of the helm charts you want to install along with any configuration
kustomize scripts.

Then everything is versioned and audited; you know who changed what, when and why. If a change breaks things, just revert via git like any other source code change.

You can then add pipelines to verify changes in the Pull Requests result in valid kubernetes YAML etc.

Jenkins X 3 and Argo CD

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There have been a number of requests from the Jenkins X community to use Argo CD for the last mile deployment phase of their continuous delivery pipelines. This blog explains some of the advantages of using Jenkins X and Argo CD all together.

What’s included?

Jenkins X for Cloud Infrastructure using Terraform, core installation management with GitOps, external secret management, ingress controller, quickstarts, automated CI + CD pipelines, ChatOps
Tekton for pipeline orchestration
Argo CD for end users application deployments (not the main installation) Argo CD provides a declarative GitOps approach to deploying Kubernetes based applications. There is a GUI which helps construct the deployment definition (in the form of an Application custom resource) which offers a number of configuration options, as well and providing insight into your clusters applications.

You might be wondering why you would want to use BOTH Jenkins X and Argo CD together. Jenkins X aims to embrace OSS, where possible providing a nice UX to integrate with other projects and help provide better solutions for building, developing and running software on Kubernetes. Jenkins X indeed does have a git operator that applies Kubernetes YAML from a Git repository but there are some differences:

Continuous microservices with databases in Jenkins X

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A common question we get asked on the Jenkins X project is how to get started creating microservices that use databases with automated CI/CD with GitOps Promotion and Preview Environments.

To make things a little easier to get started we’ve created a new node-postgresql quickstart.

Before you start

If you are using the cloud then we prefer cloud over kubernetes for things like databases, storage, ingress and secret managers so please try use your clouds managed databases if you can.

Jenkins X at cdCon

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

cdCon 2021 is about to start with lots of great sessions.

Here’ a list of the Jenkins X related sessions:

Tuesday, June 22 GitOps Summit

Best Practices for Secret Management with GitOps - Kara de la Marck, CloudBees
- GitOps uses Git as the “single source of truth” for declarative infrastructure and enables developers to manage infrastructure with the same Git-based workflows they use to manage a codebase. Having all configuration files version-controlled by Git has many advantages, but best practices for securely managing secrets with GitOps remain contested. Join us in this presentation about GitOps and Secret Management. Attendees will learn about different approaches to secret management with GitOps, the issues involved, and the secret management solutions offered by various tools and platforms. We will discuss the pros and cons of Vault, SOPS, offerings by public cloud providers, and more.

Wednesday, June 23

MLOps with Jenkins-X: Production-ready Machine Learning by Terry Cox
- Explore ways to treat Machine Learning assets as first class citizens within a DevOps process as Jenkins-X MLOps Lead, Terry Cox demonstrates how to automate your training and release pipeline in Cloud environments, using the library of ML template projects provided with Jenkins-X.
Enabling a DevOps Mindset at Scale in an Enterprise by Jimmy McNamara & Nick Penston, Fidelity Investments
- Talk through the cultural enablers to create a strong DevOps culture within large organisations. Nick and Jimmy will talk through the cultural enablers to support large numbers of very talented and ambitious cloud engineers. Touching on strategies supporting strong communication and talent development for cloud engineers. Key themes: Talent Development Enabling DevOps culture Harnessing the voice of the developer/cloud engineer
BoF Session: Jenkins X - James Strachan & James Rawlings, Cloudbees by James Strachan & James Rawlings
- This BoF will be an open discussion on anything related to Jenkins X, automating Continuous Delivery, Kubernetes, cloud and how to Accelerate delivering value to your customers

Thursday, June 24

How Jenkins X is Integrating Observability from the Inside, and the Benefits for its Users by Vincent Behar, Dailymotion

Don't use docker, use kubernetes

Mon, 17 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Are you developing software that’s intended to run on kubernetes? If so we recommend not to use docker on your laptop.

Docker on Windows/MacOS helps you run a VM that can then run linux containers easily. But why bother?

We highly recommend just use a development kubernetes cluster - build and run your containers there instead then you’re closer to a production like environment.

Why use kubernetes instead of docker?

why test on a completely different VM and container orchestrator than production? It’s better to test on a similar environment to where you are really going to deploy your code
test your kubernetes yaml / helm chart and associated configuration at the same time as you run your containers helps you catch mistakes earlier:
- it’s not just about running the container image; it’s about lots of other things too like networking, configuration, secrets, storage/volumes, cloud infrastructure, service mesh, liveness/readiness/startup probes - so why not test all of those things rather than just the image?
some corporate environments don’t let you run VMs on your laptop anyway so running docker locally isn’t an option

How to get kubernetes?

First you’ll need a kubernetes cluster.

Jenkins X 3 - May 2021 LTS

Wed, 12 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

May 2001 LTS release is now available!

LTS is a slower cadence version stream which contains a verified set of releases and configurations that have been used by teams tracking the bleeding edge Jenkins X.

Included in this release:

Protect Pipeline Visualiser with OAuth2 how to docs
Terraform repositories are now protected by the Jenkins X version stream
external-dns helm chart upgrade to v5.0.0
Reduce external secrets polling of cloud services to reduce cloud costs
[Jenkins] for users using Jenkins the Tekton Client plugin is now installed by default
Stackdriver format logging enabled when using GKE and services that use jx-logging library. If you enable the Stackdriver API in GCP you will get well formatted logs and alerts via Stackdriver.
Jenkins X Grafana dashboards updates with Lighthouse telemetry

Jenkins X 3.x GA is here!

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m super excited to announce the 3.0 GA (General Availability) release of Jenkins X!

Jenkins X automates your CI/CD on kubernetes to help you accelerate:

Automated CI/CD pipelines lets you focus on your actually application code while Jenkins X automatically creates battle tested Tekton CI/CD pipelines for your project which are managed via GitOps so that its super easy to keep your pipelines up to date across your repositories or to upgrade or override pipelines or steps for specific repositories.
Automatic promotion of versioned artifacts via GitOps through your Environments such as Staging, Pre-production and Production whether they are running in the same kubernetes cluster or you are using multiple clusters for your environments
Preview Environments lets you propose code changes via Pull Requests and have a Preview Environment automatically created, running your code in kubernetes to get fast feedback from your team before agreeing to merge changes to the main branch
ChatOps comment on Pull Requests to give feedback, approve/hold changes, trigger optional pipelines for additional testing and other ChatOps commands

Demo

Here’s a demo of how to develop code with Jenkins X

Jenkins X 3 - April 2021 LTS

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second LTS release for Jenkins X 3.x.

LTS is a slower cadence version stream which contains a verified set of releases and configurations that have been used by teams tracking the bleeding edge Jenkins X.

Initially when we decided to maintain an LTS version stream we thought we’d aim for monthly releases however this second release comes two months after the first. This has given us more chances to run fixes and chart upgrades on Jenkins X own infrastructure to verify stability.

Traces for your pipelines

Thu, 08 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Now that Jenkins X has solid integration with Grafana for its observability, it’s time to start building fun things!

And the first one is tracing for all your pipelines:

With it, you can easily see the timings of all your pipelines, stages, and steps. This is great to inspect a “slow” pipeline and quickly see the slower steps.

We are using OpenTelemetry to generate a “logical” view of the pipeline, with 1 trace per pipeline and 1 span for each stage and step.

Jenkins X v3: now with built-in observability

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As a Continuous Delivery platform, Jenkins X has a central part in your infrastructure. If it becomes unstable or unusable, it will impact the whole software delivery of your organization.

This is why observability is a critical topic for Jenkins X, and work has started to get observability built-in for Jenkins X v3:

Platform Observability: visualize logs and metrics for everything running in the Kubernetes cluster: Jenkins X’s own components - Tekton, Lighthouse, cert-manager, … - but also your own applications, that will be deployed either in preview environments or in the staging/prod environments.
Continuous Delivery Indicators: visualize pull requests, pipelines, releases, and deployments metrics, collected from cluster events and git events.

We’re using Grafana as the central visualization component: the main entry point from which you can get a complete overview of both your application’s lifecycle - development, build, tests, releases, deployments, runtime - and your Continuous Delivery platform.

Scaling Preview Environments with Osiris

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of Jenkins X’s core features is the preview environments: temporary environments created automatically for each Pull Requests, to deploy your application and its dependencies. You can then use this preview environment to run integration tests, or manually use/test your application.

This is all great until you have more and more applications, each with a few dependencies (postgresql, mongodb, …) and a few opened pull requests at any time. This means that you’ll get more and more pods running in your Kubernetes cluster, in addition to Jenkins X’s own components, your build pipelines, and of course your staging and production applications - unless you are using multi-cluster. The result is that you’ll need more nodes or bigger nodes. Which means more money.

cdCon 2021 - Call for Jenkins X Proposals

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hear ye! Hear ye! Jenkins X Community,

cdCon 2021 (the Continuous Delivery Foundation’s annual flagship event) is happening June 23-24 and its call for papers is open!

This is your chance to share what you’ve been doing with Jenkins X. Are you building something cool? Using it to solve real-world problems? Are you making things fast? Secure? Or maybe you’re a contributor and want to share what’s new. In all cases, we want to hear from you!

GitOps your cloud native pipelines

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Tekton pipelines are cloud native and are designed from the ground up for kubernetes and the cloud:

there’s no single point of failure and the pipelines are elastically scalable
each pipeline is completely declarative and self defined
each pipeline executes independently of any others
pipelines are orchestrated via the sophisticated kubernetes scheduler:
- can use pipeline specific metadata for resource limits and node selectors: memory, CPU, machine type (GPU, windows/macOS/linux etc)
its easy to associate pipelines with Cloud IAM roles to avoid you having to upload cluster admin secrets to your public CI service which really helps security and helps reduce accidental bitcoin mining on your cloud account

In a previous blog we talked about how you can accelerate your use of tekton with Jenkins X.

Jenkins X 3 - February 2021 LTS

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first LTS release for Jenkins X 3.x. We are still in the Beta release and the leadup to GA includes ensuring the process for LTS monthly releases is validated and working well. This first releases focuses on:

community feedback following the Beta release
general helm chart upgrades
improved developer UX when editing Tekton pipelines here
support for in-repo and shared Tekton pipeline libraries including git URI support, e.g.

uses:jenkins-x/jx3-pipeline-catalog/packs/javascript/.lighthouse/jenkins-x/pullrequest.yaml@v1.2.3`

more documentation and examples can be found here

Jenkins X 3.x walkthroughs

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Jenkins X 3.x is now looking ahead towards a GA release, with that we are producing walkthroughs for key areas to help users not only get started but get the most out of Jenkins X.

To kick this off we are going to start with 9 videos that we’ll follow up with more dedicated blogs over the coming weeks. The complete playlist can be found here however the blog below gives a more context for each one.

New features in the pipelines visualizer UI

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Jenkins X Pipelines Visualizer UI has recently received a number of new features, so let’s do a little tour of these new features!

Pipeline View

When viewing a pipeline, the biggest new feature is the collapsed logs. No more hundreds - or thousands - of log lines, we now group the logs per-container (step), which are collapsed by default. Along with the status of the step and its duration, so it’s easier to go to the interesting part of the logs.

Jenkins X 3.x beta is here!

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m super excited to announce the 3.0 beta of Jenkins X! Christmas has come early this year!

the main documentation of the changes are:

the new architecture with modular plugins and improved extension points
what has changed since 3.x started
how 3.x compares to 2.x

but here’s a brief summary of the differences:

User Changes

As a user the high level UX of Jenkins X is similar:

automated Continuous Delivery pipelines for using tekton for your repositories with automatic promotion between your environments
pull requests on your repositories create separate Preview Environments where your team can review your changes and give fast feedback before your changes are approved and merged into the main trunk.

New features

we now default to vanilla tekton YAML for defining pipelines while accelerating your tekton with tekton catalog
we include an open source dashboard for visualising pipelines and logs which you can invoke via:

jx dash

Platform Changes

we now use helm (3.x) and helmfile along with optionally kustomize in a GitOps style to define and configure both Jenkins X itself, your tools and applications in any namespace
support multi cluster out of the box so you can keep Staging and Production in separate clusters to your development cluster where your pipelines run, you create and release immutable container images and other artifacts.
to setup or upgrade Jenkins X we use terraform to setup your cloud resources on Azure, Amazon or Google while also supporting on-premises, minkube and OpenShift - see the Admin Guides for more detail
- the actual installation of kubernetes resources takes place using the git operator so it runs reliably inside the cluster itself
we default to using Kubernetes External Secrets to manage all secrets for Jenkins X itself, development tools and your applications too.
- This means we can support various secret backends such as Alibaba Cloud KMS Secret Manager, Amazon Secret Manager, Azure Key Vault, Hashicorp Vault or GCP Secret Manager
- It also means we can then check in all kubernetes resources and custom resources directly into git (apart from Kubernetes Secrets) so that it super easy to version, review and reason about your kubernetes resources in a GitOps way.
built in TLS and DNS support along with Heath reporting and visualising via kuberhealthy
we now have an LTS distribution which lets you switch to a much more slower cadence of releases of Jenkins X

We have been using Jenkins X 3.x in production now for many months (for CI/CD of all of the 3.x codebase and continuously upgrading our cluster in the standard way and it’s been much simpler and easier to use, operate and configure.

Jenkins X 3.x - beta is close!

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It has been ‘all hands on deck’ in recent months with the focus on Jenkins X 3 alpha. First off a huge thankyou to everyone involved. The OSS community spirit has really shone through what has been a very difficult year for everyone. Knowing that people from all over the world come and help each other, share banter and work at all hours of the day to help build out a true open source cloud native continuous delivery solution for developers - it’s quite fantastic to see and amazing to be apart of.

Accelerate your Tekton with Jenkins X

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

WARNING: This post refers to the unmaintained Jenkins X version 1 or 2

This post is outdated and is kept only out of historical interest. Some broken links have been removed.

One of the goals of Jenkins X has always been to help accelerate and automate Continuous Delivery so that developers can focus on delivering value to their customers; either by creating that new microservice or adding features to an existing project and not writing and managing pipelines.

Hacktoberfest

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce that Jenkins X will be participating in Hacktoberfest again this year! Hacktoberfest is a month-long global celebration of open source software.

From October 1 to October 31, submit four pull requests to qualify for the limited edition Hacktoberfest shirt. All backgrounds and skill levels are encouraged to participate in Hacktoberfest and join a global community of open source contributors.

Learn more about Hacktoberfest and sign up here.

New UI to visualize your pipelines and logs

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the Jenkins X Pipelines Visualizer: a new open-source read-only UI for Jenkins X, with a very specific goal and scope: visualize the pipelines and logs.

This project was started at Dailymotion and quickly shared with the Jenkins X community.

Why a new UI?

There is already the Octant-based UI, so why a new UI?

The main reason is that Octant “is an application and is intended as a single client tool and at this time there are no plans to support hosted versions of Octant” - see this thread on the Octant github repository for more information and details.

Jenkins X Talks at CDCon

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There will be six Jenkins X talks given by various speakers at the first-ever CDCon on October 7-8. The two-day virtual event, hosted by the Continuous Delivery Foundation, will focus on improving the world’s capacity to deliver software with security and speed.

Wednesday, October 7

A CI/CD Framework for Production Machine Learning at Massive Scale (using Jenkins X and Seldon Core) Speaker: Alejandro Saucedo, Seldon Time: 1:15 PM PDT

Welcome to Jenkins X 3.x alpha!

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are very pleased to announce the alpha release of Jenkins X version 3

You can read more about the overview of the architecture and components here.

This release has lots of benefits over version 2 is much easier to use, understand and manage. It is more flexible and simpler to configure for different infrastructures and cloud providers.

The new release works well with any combination of helm 3, helmfile, kpt and/or kustomize.

Octant: the OSS UI for Jenkins X

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A common question we have heard in the community over the years is Is there an open source UI for Jenkins X?.

Well we now have an answer: its Octant using the octant-jx plugin.

Why Octant?

We love Octant because:

open source and very easy to extend with plugins in Go or TypeScript/JavaScript
lets you visualise and work with all kubernetes and custom resources across multiple clusters
thanks to octant-jx has awesome integration with Jenkins X components like apps, environments, pipelines, repositories etc.

Features

Longer term we’re planning on making most of the developer and operations features of Jenkins X available through the UI via octant-jx.

CJXD to upstream Jenkins X to the future

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

CJXD was first introduced at the end of July 2019 with the aim to provide a more stable version of Jenkins X that was under heavy development. The release cadence was reduced to one per month, the upgrade process well tested and a large focus on stability issues was taken on. It is fair to say that this was not only expected but absolutely needed by users of Jenkins X to service their own software delivery. A little over a year on we are now in a better place, following the improvements above means we are now able to focus all attention back towards the upstream Jenkins X and look towards where Jenkins X needs to go next. There is still much to do, areas which require attention in design, upgrades related to other projects and innovation to explore. With that, the need for CJXD over and above using upstream Jenkins X is reduced. CloudBees will stop releasing CJXD builds and focus purely upstream and it’s engineering efforts towards working with the OSS community on JX3 Alpha, Beta, GA and beyond.

Consolidate the use of Apps / Addons - Coding Phase 2

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The coding phase 2 of Google Summer of Code will end this week, so I’d like to share my coding phase 2 work.

The addons have been migrated to apps on coding phase 1, but these apps have not been hosted to OSS, so during the coding phase 2, Jenkins X team build OSS cluster to host my apps:

you can use jx add app command to install the above apps, I also made a number of PR:

Consolidate the use of Apps / Addons - Coding Phase 1

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The coding phase 1 of Google Summer of Code ended last week, I’m working on Consolidate the use of Apps / Addons, so I’d like to share my coding phase 1 work.

In the project, I mainly migrate addons to apps, the way is easier for improve jx apps and addons.

During the time, I’ve migrated all addons to apps via Helm chart way.

The following is my make apps:

Current, we only move to jx-app-kubeless to the jenkins-x-apps repository, other apps haven’t been moved to the jenkins-x-apps repository.

Jenkins X & Open Innovation

Wed, 08 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Jenkins X burst onto the CI/CD scene a couple of years ago - reimagining CI/CD on Kubernetes with pipeline automation, GitOps built-in and and preview environments to help teams collaborate and accelerate their software delivery at any scale. It has been evolving at a breakneck pace, keeping up with the changes in the wider Kubernetes ecosystem.

With the release of Helm 3, Jenkins X Labs nurtured an early experiment to adopt it. On May 15th, the primary sponsor of Jenkins X, CloudBees, shared a post talking about the future direction of Helm 3 and Jenkins X.

CloudBees contributions to Jenkins X - June 2020

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

For everyone here at Cloudbees, June has been a really productive month and the release 11 of CJXD comes with a set of new available features and fixes for upstream Jenkins X, as well as a new version of the UI that we are really excited to release!

Regarding Jenkins X new features:

Thanks to Hardy Ferentschik, you can now bring your own Vault to your Jenkins X cluster. It will allow you to use an already existing Vault instance to store your Jenkins X secrets, checkout the documentation here. He also improved the existing documentation to help you access and manage your secrets.

My story with Jenkins X GSoC - Consolidate the use of Apps / Addons

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 22:55:25 +0800

I’m Zixuan, and I’m very happy to be recognized by the Jenkins and Jenkins X teams in Google Summer of Code 2020.

I’m working on Consolidate the use of Apps / Addons.

Excellent mentor team

Jenkins and Jenkins X has an excellent team of mentors, everyone is very kind and super knowledgeable.

James Strachan
Kara de la Marck
markyjackson
Nikhil Da Rocha
Oleg Nenashev
Oscar Medina
Sahil Kalra
Sladyn

Work output

I have been working on this project for some time. During this time, I have migrated some addons to apps.

Lighthouse Goes GA!

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In May of this year, Jenkins X switched from using Prow as its default webhook handler to using Lighthouse. This is the result of almost a year of work, and provides some significant improvements for users of Jenkins X. You can find more information on the differences between Prow and Lighthouse here.

Most notably, Jenkins X now properly supports GitHub Enterprise as well as github.com, with preview support for GitLab and BitBucket Server. Prow only supports github.com, so until now, Jenkins X users have had to jump through hoops or accept significant limitations to their workflows in order to use any other SCM (source control management) providers. Lighthouse is tested against every provider we list support for, including the preview support for GitLab and BitBucket Server. While some functionality may not behave exactly the same on all providers, the core functionality of ChatOps should work on all. Lighthouse also has a smaller footprint in terms of resources and pods used in your Kubernetes cluster than Prow.

An update on helm 3 and JXL

Fri, 15 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

What’s next for JXL and Helm 3?

A few months back, we unveiled JXL to the Jenkins X community and framed it as a new thing, Jenkins X Labs, that would build out experimental features and test potential new things. Some would stick and go upstream into Jenkins X, others would be killed off as interesting but unsuccessful experiments.

This was a new thing for Jenkins X, trying to better separate the experimentation loop from the increasingly stable and relied-upon upstream. And, to a degree it worked great - the JXL workaround helm 3 was awesome, and got a lot of excitement.

CloudBees contributions to Jenkins X - April 2020

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the challenges of this particular time in the world it amazes me how members of the Jenkins X community continue to rise up and generously contribute to the project. This month’s CJXD release is with no lack of upstream community contributions, thus I’m kicking off this blog with a very sincere THANK YOU to the contributors.

A number of folks here at CloudBees continue to focus on Jenkins X stability and supportability. In parallel, other folks are focused on new features and expanding support for additional platforms. In an effort to help us continue these efforts, we completed the plan to remove code for Jenkins static masters in favor of going full-on with Tekton pipelines. In addition, a number of unsupported commands scheduled for deprecation have now been removed from the code.

Season of Docs 2020 📄

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 11:44:25 +0100

WARNING: This post refers to the unmaintained Jenkins X version 1 or 2

This post is outdated and is kept only out of historical interest. Some broken links have been removed.

Google Season of Docs fosters collaboration between open source projects and technical writers. This program brings the open source and technical writing communities together to improve documentation and increase awareness of open source. During the program, technical writers are given support in contributing to open source, information about the technical project to which they are contributing, and a stipend.

CloudBees contributions to Jenkins X - March 2020

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

March has been a really busy month for us working on Jenkins X, several exciting projects are now well underway.

Recently at office hours we discussed a proposal to improve how we provision the cloud resources (storage buckets, service accounts & cryptographic keys) that Jenkins X requires. The idea behind this enhancement is that some companies may require the infrastructure to be provisioned by a user (someone in operations perhaps) that requires a different set of permissions than the user that runs jx boot to install Jenkins X. Previously this happened when a user ran jx boot. But from community feedback we learned that some users would like this process split. To help with this we are in the process of developing Terraform modules that you can use to create the necessary resources. Work on this has been moving really quickly and we have been focusing on support for GKE, EKS & AKS. We are really excited to see the awesome contributions from Heba Elayoty of Microsoft on adding support for Azure Kubernetes Service in Jenkins X. If you do not use Terraform and you have another way of provisioning infrastructure don’t worry, we’ll be providing lots of information in the docs on exactly what you will need to create before booting Jenkins X. For anyone that would like more information or would like to contribute to the Terraform modules you will find the git repository for GKE here and EKS here.

Google Summer of Code 2020 ☀️

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 11:26:18 +0000

Jenkins X is incredibly happy to participate in Google Summer of Code 2020!

Jenkins X has been open source from its inception and many of the founders and core contributors to Jenkins X have been deeply involved in open source for years. We love open source for many reasons, including how it enables rapid innovation and collaboration among remote, distributed teams and communities. For these reasons and more, we are very happy to participate in Google Summer of Code.

Jenkins X ❤ Tekton

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Jenkins X is committing fully to Tekton as its pipeline execution engine. We are convinced that this is the right choice for Jenkins X, as a cloud-native CI/CD platform on Kubernetes, and for our users.

This means we are formally deprecating - and will be removing - traditional Jenkins static masters support inside Jenkins X. We are excited about the new way forward, which we’ll discuss further below, but it’s important to be clear about what this means for current users. If you are already using Jenkins X with Tekton-based pipelines, then nothing will change for you, and you do not need to change anything. If you’re running a traditional Jenkinsfile on Jenkins X, then you have three choices:

Walkthrough: Setting up Jenkins X on a Kubernetes cluster

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through setting up Jenkins X on a Kubernetes cluster hosted on GKE. We will use GitHub as our Git provider.

The purpose of this tutorial is to give a detailed step-by-step walkthrough of setting up Jenkins X.

Setup used in this tutorial

GitHub as our Git provider and a GitHub user account, eg MarckK
A Google Cloud Platform (GCP) account with the ability to provision kubernetes resources / create kubernetes clusters

Google Secrets Manager Kubernetes controller

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In Jenkins X Labs we have been working with Google Secrets Manager (which is currently in Beta so may still change). It is an extremely nice experience and if you also use Google Container Engine (GKE), Google’s managed Kubernetes service then we can make use of another cool feature, Workload Identity to automatically access secrets in their hosted service using a Kubernetes service account.

One of the initial challenges we had was we didn’t see an obvious way to automatically create Kubernetes secrets that include the data stored from Secrets Manager. So we created a little standalone controller that runs in a Kubernetes cluster and watches for Kubernetes secrets. When one is added or updated with a particular annotation the controller will access the secret using its ID in Secrets Manager and update the Kubernetes secret with the value.

Jenkins X Labs

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Jenkins X has entered it’s third year and as always we are looking for big ways things can be improved. Briefly reflecting on the last two years:

first was about initial adoption and finding out what developers were both looking for and needed when moving to Kubernetes. We started off using a Static Jenkins server for example to orchestrate builds and other open source projects that folks would be familiar with, to aid their journey to the cloud. We quickly realised that the Jenkins X community wanted to leverage more of their cloud capabilities and so we began to swap in cloud native implementations like Tekton and Prow, as well as better integration with managed cloud services like storage, dns, IAM etc.

CloudBees contributions to Jenkins X - February 2020

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

2020 is fully underway and Jenkins X is feeling the benefits from a lot of hard work from the tail end of last year. There is now support on EKS for Jenkins X! Here are the docs:

https://jayex.io/docs/getting-started/setup/boot/clouds/amazon/

They are still being improved so we’d love feedback in the Slack channel or issues (PRs would be even better ;)) on the website repository to help improve. By the way a Pull Request on the docs repo results in a preview environment of the website, so you can see your changes and ask for feedback in true Jenkins X form.

3 Jenkins X talks at FOSDEM 2020

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

FOSDEM 2020 was fantastic! We were thrilled to be there, answering questions about Jenkins X at the Jenkins X - CDF - Jenkins booth.

This was the first year there was a CI/CD devroom at FOSDEM. Among the excellent talks, three focused on Jenkins X in their demos:

Choosing The Right Deployment Strategy, by Viktor Farcic
Progressive Delivery: Continuous Delivery the Right Way, by Carlos Sanchez
A Practical CI/CD Framework for Machine Learning at Massive Scale, by Alejandro Saucedo

Choosing The Right Deployment Strategy

by Viktor Farcic

Asking and Finding help - Outreachy

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Neha Gupta is adding support for Kustomize in Jenkins X, to enable Kubernetes native configuration management, while participating in Outreachy from December 2019 to March 2020.

Outreachy open-source contribution for applicants — Asking/Finding help

This blog might be helpful for beginners who are fear-stricken or I would say hesitant to ASK, to get lost in the new world while trying to understand any open source project, fear of asking questions that may sound stupid later on or are very obvious! First of all.. Relax!

Happy Second Birthday Jenkins X!

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Jenkins X project started the beginning of 2019 by celebrating its first birthday on the 14th January, a big event for any open source project, and we have just celebrated our 2nd - hooray!

image by Ashley McNamara, creative commons license

Two Years of Jenkins X!

Jenkins X has evolved from a vision of how CI/CD could be reimagined in a cloud native world, to a fast-moving, innovative, rapidly maturing open source project.

Outreachy - Motivation to apply!

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Neha Gupta is adding support for Kustomize in Jenkins X, to enable Kubernetes native configuration management, while participating in Outreachy from December 2019 to March 2020.

Motivation to apply to Outreachy :

In my graduation class of fifty people we were three girls struggling to set up our space and comfort with the weird reactions we got from fellow students for trying to understand technology. When my professor asked us to make an autonomous drone. I couldn’t make one, I was shattered, until a friend from computer science batch helped me make one. He showed me some of the cool apps he made, that sparked an interest, and I started building apps, realising that computer science is beyond just coding, it’s more about solving real life problems.

FOSDEM 2020

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas, and collaborate.

FOSDEM

FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open source software movement. FOSDEM will take place on 1 and 2 of February in Brussels, Belgium. See the event site for more details.

Welcome Neha Gupta to Jenkins X as our Outreachy intern

Thu, 28 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

With sponsorship from the CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation), Jenkins X is participating in the Outreachy mentorship program. This is the first time that Jenkins X will be participating in Outreachy and we are fortunate to be working with such a phenomenal organisation. You can read more about our decision to participate in Outreachy here.

We’re excited to announce that an intern has been selected! Neha Gupta will be working with us to create a cloud storage backed Helm repository for Jenkins X to replace ChartMuseum.

Contribute to Jenkins X at our Hackathon in Lisbon on 2 December

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’re having a Jenkins X hackathon in Lisbon on December 2! The hackathon is free to attend and will be a joint hackathon with the Jenkins project.

Please note this hackathon takes place the day before the Jenkins X Contributor Summit, which is also free to attend and we would love to see you at both.

These events are being organised for the community in the days prior to DevOps World | Jenkins World Lisbon. We realised many Jenkins X and Jenkins community members will be attending the conference and wanted to create additional opportunities for community members to meet and collaborate.

Join Us at the Jenkins X Contributor Summit Lisbon on 3 December

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Attendance at the Jenkins X Contributor Summit is free, and a DevOps World | Jenkins World conference pass is not necessary, but please RSVP if you are going to attend.

The Jenkins X Contributor Summit is an opportunity for current and future Jenkins X contributors to come together to discuss the project, learn and collaborate. There will be discussions on the latest exciting developments in Jenkins X and time to contribute to the project. We welcome new contributors: this is a great chance to learn more about the project, find out how to contribute and meet the core contributors!

Introduction to Jenkins X @ Jenkins World | DevOps World Lisbon

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 12:20:42 -0700

In today’s technology landscape, people find it difficult to get up to speed with technologies for many reasons. One reason that comes to mind is time. Another may be that some folks are just not able to read a tutorial or blog post and be successful at ramping up with a specific technology.

So these individuals need either a bootcamp or to sit and watch live demos and have someone explain concepts. It is for these reasons that Oscar and Andrew will be introducing Jenkins X to people that might have heard of it, but have not yet had a chance to play with it.

CFP: CI/CD Devroom at FOSDEM 2020

Wed, 09 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas, and collaborate.

For the first time, there will be a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) devroom at FOSDEM! The CI/CD devroom will take place on 2nd of February 2020 in Brussels, Belgium.

FOSDEM

FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open source software development.

It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open source software movement. FOSDEM will take place on 1st and 2nd of February in Brussels, Belgium. See the event site for more details.

Outreachy

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Jenkins X is happy to announce our participation in the Outreachy program running from December 2019 to March 2020.

Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved by providing “a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.” The internships are for three-months, during which mentees work on specific projects.

Contribute to Jenkins X as part of Hacktoberfest

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest is a month-long global celebration of open source software.

We’d love for you to contribute to the Jenkins X project!

All pull requests will count towards your Hacktoberfest challenge. Issues labelled “hacktoberfest” generally indicate good first issues. Jenkins X welcomes contributors to both:

Jenkins X Key Takeaways from Jenkins World 2019

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Jenkins X was the star of the show at DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019. In this article I will share with you the dozen key things I learned about this exciting new cloud native CI/CD tool. Beyond its capabilities as a CI/CD tool, Jenkins X also provides an excellent example of how to architect a cloud native application on Kubernetes.

Jenkins X is a completely new CI/CD system that shares little but its name with the existing Jenkins. Jenkins X incorporates the best practices from the State of DevOps reports and the seminal book, Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim.

A New Logo for Jenkins X

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 07:36:00 +0200

Back in March 2018, the Jenkins X project burst onto the scene as the Jenkins counterpart for automated CI/CD for Kubernetes. As part of that launch featured the logo: a variation of the Jenkins logo, featuring a pipe-smoking ship captain with Kubernetes logo on his cap.

In software, we like to say that naming is hard - because it is. Another thing that is also hard is trying to capture the essence of a project in a logo. Logos pack a lot of meaning into a small space. Icons, such as the Jenkins logo, establish a strong emotional connection with many developers. So with that in mind we always listened closely to feedback on the new logo and how people perceive the project as a result of it.

Increasing CI/CD Pipeline Observability in Jenkins X

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 10:44:40 -0700

Increasing CI/CD Pipeline Observability, implement tracing

Credit: [Minds Eye Creative](https://www.mindseyecreative.ca/) | [DevOps Days Toronto](https://devopsdays.org/events/2018-toronto/program/clay-smith/)

Overview

You might have heard of Observability given that folks have been talking about this for a while now. Sure, you might think it is just the latest tech buzzword. However, the practice has been around for a long time now.

Observability is certainly relevant today given the Microservices architectures, distributed systems, and the characteristics of modern applications being deployed at a faster pace by leveraging CI/CD pipelines to Kubernetes, in this case using Jenkins X. Indeed old practices of setting up monitoring after an app is deployed, are no longer acceptable.

Using Jenkins X To Define And Run Serverless Deployments

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 12:20:42 -0200

Using Jenkins X To Define And Run Serverless Deployments

What is Serverless Computing?

To understand serverless computing, one needs to understand the challenges we are facing with more “traditional” types of deployments of our applications. A long time ago, most of us were deploying our apps directly to servers. We had to decide the size (memory and CPU) of the nodes where our applications would run, we had to create those servers, and we had to maintain them. The situation improved with the emergence of cloud computing. We still had to do all those things, but now those tasks were much easier due to the simplicity of the APIs and services cloud vendors gave us. Suddenly, we had (a perception of) infinite resources and all we had to do is run a command, and a few minutes later the servers (VMs) we needed would materialize. Things become much easier and faster. But, that did not remove the tasks of creating and maintaining servers. Instead, that made them more straightforward. Concepts like immutability become mainstream as well. As a result, we got much-needed reliability, reduced drastically lean time, and started to rip benefits of elasticity.

DevOps World - Jenkins World 2019 San Francisco: Lunch Time Demos

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 12:20:42 -0200

If you’re looking for more opportunities to learn Jenkins and Jenkins X during the lunch hours while at DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019 San Francisco, come join us at the Jenkins and Jenkins X Community Booth!

If you don’t yet have your pass for DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019 San Francisco, and don’t want to miss out on the fun, you can get yours using JWFOSS for a 30% discount.

Join Us at the Jenkins X Contributor Summit San Francisco, Monday August 12, 2019

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 10:20:42 -0200

Register here to participate in the Jenkins X Contributor Summit in San Francisco. Attendance at the Jenkins X Contributor Summit is free, and a DevOps World | Jenkins World conference pass is not necessary, but please RSVP if you are going to attend.

Installing Jenkins X on Alibaba Cloud Container Service

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 07:36:00 +0200

Installing Jenkins X on Alibaba Cloud Container Service

Installing Jenkins X in Alibaba Kubernetes Container Service

Jenkins X has just added initial support to install in Alibaba Container Service, its Kubernetes offering.

The following instructions allow installation in a managed Kubernetes cluster in any region outside of mainland China, where more configuration is needed avoid using Google services blocked by chinese authorities (Docker images in GCR). There is a pending issue for that.

DevOps World-Jenkins World 2019 San Francisco: Agenda is Live

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 12:20:42 -0700

DevOps World | Jenkins World is the largest Jenkins gathering of the year. From August 12 - 15, 2019 the event will take place at the Moscone West Center in San Francisco. The event boasts 100+ sessions, and will offer training, hands-on workshops, onsite certification, contributor summit and much more. Conference attendees can expect to be inspired while learning the latest innovations from industry leaders. Attendees will learn the value that digital transformation has in delivering software more efficiently, more quickly and with higher quality.

Jenkins Community Awards

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 12:20:42 -0700

It is time for the 3rd annual, DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019 Community Awards. These nominations are indicative of the excellent work Jenkins community members are doing for the betterment of Jenkins.

This will be the third year we are commemorating community members who have shown excellence through commitment, creative thinking, and contributions to continue making Jenkins a great open source community.

The award categories include:

Most Valuable Contributor - This award is presented to the Jenkins contributor who has helped move the Jenkins project forward the most through their invaluable feature contributions, bug fixes or plugin development efforts.
Jenkins Security MVP - This award is presented to the individual most consistently providing excellent security reports or who helped secure Jenkins by fixing security issues.
Most Valuable Advocate - This award is presented to an individual who has helped advocate for Jenkins through the organization of their local Jenkins Area Meetup.
Most Innovative Jenkins X Implementation - Presented to an innovative user who has embraced Jenkins X.

Nominate yourself or someone today! Winners will be announced at DevOps World | Jenkins World San Francisco 2019 on August 12-15. The deadline for nomination is Tuesday, April 30th.

Jenkins X joins the CDF

Sat, 09 Mar 2019 07:36:00 +0200

We are thrilled to announce that Jenkins X will be joining the Continuous Delivery Foundation as one of the founding projects. The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) is a brand new sub-foundation of the Linux Foundation and will be dedicated to advancing the practice of continuous delivery and nurturing an ecosystem of interoperable tools for software delivery.

Jenkins X is just over a year old but has been growing rapidly as the CI/CD solution for modern cloud applications on Kubernetes. Jenkins X automates CI+CD for Kubernetes using the best of breed OSS tools such as Jenkins, Tekton, Prow, Skaffold, Kaniko and Helm. The CDF will be a sibling foundation to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) which hosts Kubernetes amongst others. CDF will have its first event, CDF Summit, on May 20th alongside KubeCon Barcelona. We always love to work closely with other communities, and this will continue at scale within the CDF.

Jenkins X Pipelines integrated with Tekton

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 10:36:00 +0200

WARNING: This post refers to the unmaintained Jenkins X version 1 or 2

This post is outdated and is kept only out of historical interest. Some broken links have been removed.

Introducing the new Jenkins X Pipeline Engine

The Jenkins X team and CloudBees are excited to announce some changes that we’ve been working on and are jntroducing the new Jenkins X Pipeline Engine.

Today, there are two ways that you can run your Jenkins pipelines in Jenkins X.

Happy 1st Birthday Jenkins X

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 07:36:00 +0200

Time flies when you are delivering software. It has been just over a year since the initial commit went into Github for Jenkins X, the CI/CD solution for cloud native. In just 12 months, Jenkins X progress has been breathtaking, so let’s celebrate by taking a look at all that has been accomplished in this short space of time.

One of the main founders of Jenkins X is James Strachan of CloudBees, who is known for building many popular open source software projects such as Apache Groovy, Apache Camel and fabric8. Notable these projects also have enduring open source software communities around them. With all this experience it is safe to say James simply gets developers and what they want, need and care about.

Serverless Jenkins

Sat, 20 Oct 2018 07:36:00 +0200

WARNING: This post refers to the unmaintained Jenkins X version 1 or 2

This post is outdated and is kept only out of historical interest. Some broken links have been removed.

Serverless Jenkins

James Rawlings has just published an excellent article on Serverless Jenkins with Jenkins X that is well worth a read.

It describes how you can use it via the --prow feature flag when using either jx create cluster

Helm 2.x without Tiller

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 07:36:00 +0200

WARNING: This post refers to the unmaintained Jenkins X version 1 or 2

This post is outdated and is kept only out of historical interest. Some broken links have been removed.

How to avoid Tiller

Helm 2.x uses a server side component called tiller. Typically Tiller is installed in a global namespace; or you can install a Tiller in each namespace and configure your helm CLI to talk to the right tiller in the right namespace.

Jenkins X at Jenkins World

Thu, 06 Sep 2018 08:36:00 +0200

Jenkins X at JenkinsWorld

Jenkins World has combined with DevOps world to become the premier DevOps event in your calendar this year - and there really isn’t much time left if you still have to register. The event is happening at San Francisco 16-19 September, and Nice,France 22-25 October. To get a discount on entry - you are invited to use the dscount code: JWRDAVIES

Some of the Jenkins X team, including James Strachan, James Rawlings, Rob Davies and Pete Muir will be available if you want some extra help with the Jenkins X project - we are cheap too - beer tokens gratefully received.

Jenkins X does KubeCon

Sat, 05 May 2018 10:36:00 +0200

Jenkins X at KubeCon

Here is the video of my talk: Jenkins X: Easy CI/CD for Kubernetes at KubeCon Europe 2018.

You can also get the slides from this talk here

You can also watch all the other KubeCon videos here

You can also register your interest in the CloudBees Kubernetes product that I gave a quick sneak peek at towards the end of the talk.

Introducing Jenkins X

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 18:36:00 +0200

Introducing Jenkins X

There’s a new blog post on jenkins.io which introduces Jenkins X and gives an overview of what it, what we’re doing and why:

Introducing Jenkins X: a CI/CD solution for modern cloud applications on Kubernetes

Please check it out and let us know what you think

JEP 400 submitted

Fri, 09 Mar 2018 18:36:00 +0200

JEP 400 Submitted for Jenkins X

We have submitted JEP 400 to propose Jenkins X as a sub project in the Jenkins Foundation.

Please check out JEP 400 and let us know what you think on the Jenkins dev list.