Preface

Jenkins is a highly acclaimed award-winning build and automation orchestration solution. It represents the cumulative efforts of hundreds of open-source developers, quality assurance engineers, and DevOps personnel worldwide. What makes this solution uniquely innovative is it is continuously updated, improved upon, and supported by this cohesively vibrant open-source community. It is through this open-source development effort that Jenkins has remained in the forefront of Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery practices.

The Jenkins platform bridges engineering disciplines, quality assurance landscapes, and business interests in an effort to connect traditionally isolated factions and transform them into cohesive engineering teams. Over the years it has vaulted in popularity and gained notoriety as an industry standard tool. Through its extensibility and collaboration initiatives its adoption rate has grown exponentially and now touts well over 100K installations worldwide.

I was formally introduced to Jenkins in 2008 when it was still Hudson. It was during this era that Hudson was just beginning to gain momentum by engineering groups outside of the Java development community. The software configuration management team I worked for was looking to implement a standardized architecture and delivery service solution across a large number of diversely acquired technology stacks. This began our quest to solidify a set of standards in build and delivery that could be applied across these diverse technology stacks and scale.

These experiences provided me with a pretty solid understanding of continuous integration, continuous delivery, build pipelines, automated testing, and the capabilities of Jenkins. By 2012 we were able to scale our implementations across a multitude of technology stacks of varying size and scope. All of these experiences would eventually culminate in me writing this book.