I am trying to setup Kubernetes for my company. I have looked a good amount into Jenkins X and, while I really like the roadmap, I have come the realization that it is likely not mature enough for my company to use at this time. (UI in preview, flaky command line, random IP address needs and poor windows support are a few of the issues that have lead me to that conclusion.)
But I understand that the normal Jenkins is very mature and can run on Kubernetes. I also understand that it can have dynamically created build agents run in the cluster.
But I am not sure about gitops support. When I try to google it (gitops jenkins) I get a bunch of information that includes Jenkins X.
Is there an easy(ish) way for normal Jenkins to use GitOps? If so, how?
Update:
By GitOps, I mean something similar to what Jenkins X supports. (Meaning changes to the cluster stored in a Git repository. And merging causes a deployment.)
I mean something similar to what Jenkins X supports. (Meaning changes to the cluster stored in a Git repository. And merging causes a deployment.)
Yes, this is the what Jenkins (or other CICD tools) do. You can declare a deployment pipeline in a Jenkinsfile that is triggered on merge (commit to master) and have other steps for other branches (if you want).
I recommend to deploy with kubectl using kustomize and store the config files in your Git repository. You parameterize different environments e.g. staging and production with overlays. You may e.g. deploy with only 2 replicas in staging but with 6 replicas and more memory resources in production.
Using Jenkins for this, I would create a docker agent image with kubectl, so your steps can use the kubectl command line tool.
Jenkins on Kubernetes
But I understand that the normal Jenkins is very mature and can run on Kubernetes. I also understand that it can have dynamically created build agents run in the cluster.
I have not had the best experience with this. It may work - or it may not work so well. I currently host Jenkins outside the Kubernetes cluster. I think that Jenkins X together with Tekton may be an upcoming promising solution for this, but I have not tried that setup.
Related
I work for a small startup. We have 3 environments (Production, Development, and Staging) and GitHub is used as VCS.
All env runs on EC2 with docker.
Can someone suggest me a simple CICD solution that can trigger builds automatically after certain branches are merged / manual trigger option?
Like, if anything in merged into dev-merge, build and deploy to development, and the same for staging and pushing the image to ECR and rolling out docker update.
We tried Jenkins but we felt it was over-complicated for our small-scale infra.
GitHub actions are also evaluated (self-hosted runners), but it needs YAMLs to be there in repos.
We are looking for something that can give us option to modify the pipeline or overall flow without code-hosted CICD config. (Like the way Jenkins gives option to either use Jenkins file or configure the job manually via GUI)
Any opinions about Team City?
The Jenkins landscape is vast and new progress is difficult to keep track especially if you are not a regular DevOps.
I am currently in process of setting up a Jenkins CI system from scratch. I am looking for the best possible ways to get the Jenkins instance up and running. I have looked at options such as running from the JAR, setting it up a service, docker, blue ocean, etc.
I was wondering if you can please share your experience if there is a pre-configured setup or a scalable Jenkins solution already available in the market which is ready to be configured/deployed.
One of the key tenant on this Jenkins instance would be test automation guys running their Selenium tests (or I am ideally looking at Windows server installation although CentOS is an option) and would like to make it working for them as easy as possible.
I'm a Jenkins admin. In my company I've set up Jenkins on our Kubernetes cluster using the Helm chart with a custom docker image preloaded with plugins (you don't want to rely on the plugin update site during startup). All configuration is done with the Configuration as Code Plugin. We're using the Kubernetes plugin to do horizontally scaling. No builds are allowed on the build controller, everything is done within agents, which is custom docker images inspired by these images. and we don't allow no builds to run on the build controller. This works very well, and I'm very happy with the setup. There is also a Jenkins Kubernetes Operator which looks promising, but I havent tried it myself.
If you're not on Kubernetes, you can take a look at the Jenkins Evergreen project.
PS: The Blue Ocean project is dead, but the folks over at Cloudbees are currently in the process of overhauling the UX. They just released a weekly version where they got rid of all tables so the design is slowly becoming more and more responsive, and also a new set of icons is also coming up.
Maybe the nearest you can get to a pre-configurated Jenkins Instance is using the Docker Image (https://hub.docker.com/r/jenkins/jenkins). But also with the docker image, you have to selected plugins and so on. Maybe you want to raise an issue as purposal in the Jenkins Docker repository to make it possible to pre-configure Jenkins (Github Repo: https://github.com/jenkinsci/docker/issues)?
I'm new to Jenkins/Docker. So far I've found lots of Jenkins official Documents recommended to be used with Docker. But the necessity and advantages of running Jenkins as a docker container remain vague to me. In my case, it's a node/react app and environment required is not complicated.
Disadvantages I've found running Jenkins as a Docker container:
High usage of hard drive
Directory path in docker container is more complicated to deal with, esp when working with ssh in pipeline scripts
Without docker, I can easily achieve the same and there's also blueocean plugin available.
So, what's the main benefits of Docker with Jenkins/Jenkins Pipeline? Are there pitfalls for my node application using Jenkins without Docker? Articles to help me dive into are also appreciated.
Jenkins as Code
The main advantages of Jenkins in Docker is that it helps you to get: Jenkins as Code
Advantages of Jenkins as code are:
SCM: Code can be in put under version control
History is transparant, backup and roll-back becomes easy.
The code is the documentation of your Jenkins setup.
Jenkins becomes portable, so you can run Jenkins locally to try new plugins etc.
Jenkins pipelines work really well with Docker. As #Ivthillo mentioned: there is no need to install additional tools, you just use images of these tool. Jenkins will download them from internet for you (Docker Hub).
For each stage in the pipeline you can use a different image (i.e. tool). Essentially you get "micro Jenkins agents" which only exists temporary. This makes your Jenkins setup much more clean.
Disadvantage is:
Jenkins initial (Groovy) configuration is poorly documented on the web.
Simple Node setup
Most arguments also holds for a simple Node setup.
Change the node version or run multiple job each with a different Node version becomes easy.
Add your Jenkinsfile inside the Node repo. So everyone with a Jenkins+Docker setup can run your CI/CD.
And finaly: gather knowledge on running your app inside a container will enable your to run your production app in Docker in the future.
Getting started
A while ago I have written an small blog on how to get started with Jenkins and Docker, i.e. create a Jenkins image for development which you can launch and destroy in seconds.
I wanted to build a Jenkins server which would run test of my puppet code on Vagrant. The issue I found is that the we run our server as VMs already, either in vmWare or AWS and Vagrant will not work as another virtualisation.
Does anyone have an idea how can I create a test platform for my puppet code. What I want to test the deployment of manifest on the nodes them self i.e. If I deploy a class web server or make changes to it I would like to check if it affects/breaks deployment of other classes.
The idea would be to iterate over all the classes/roles and see if the deployments are passing. I would like to make it automatic and independent of our engineers. At the moment we are running manual test with vagrant up however there are too many roles to do that by hand.
Any ideas how can I tackle this?
You can use either Docker or AWS provider for Vagrant.
In case of AWS provider you need to set-up RSync to get your environment into newly launched instance.
If your Vagrant scripts are robust, you can use the same script for both local deployment on your workstation and AWS/Docker deployment on CI server.
There are drawbacks to doing these techniques, in case of Docker you are limited to the same kernel that Jenkins server is running, in case of AWS you will incur additional costs. However, for AWS your don't need to allocate as much resources for your Jenkins server, so you might even save money this way because you will be using paying for extra VMs only when you are running you tests. Just make sure you will shut them down after you done.
Is there any special reason why you want to use vagrant? I'm not sure if you are setting up your production environment with vagrant or not.
In case you are not bound to vagrant, I would recommend you to think about using a docker image to prepare a lightweight environment to run your setups and verifications in.
When doing your tests, spin up a container from your image that contains your puppet distribution and run your setups/tests inside. If you have special kernel requirements, use a separate jenkins slave/agent machine rather than executing jobs on the jenkins master.
If you are not sure how to get started using jenkins with docker, have a look into the examples section of the Jenkins Documentation. The provided examples are showing the declarative pipeline syntax thats still a bit new. Also consider the collapsed Toggle Scripted Pipeline Sections which show the groovy pipeline scripts that are alot more forgiving for jenkins pipeline beginners.
Those should be quite good pointers to get started with running+testing your puppet scripts inside docker. For building and using a docker image there should be more than enough tutorials out there.
Let me know if this was a hint in the right direction or if I mistinterpreted your question.
Let's start by agreeing that we want to adhere to typical Docker/DevOps principles. Therefore, we want to keep tasks isolated, configurations versions controlled, and overall customization to a minimum.
The Landscape:
Jenkins is being used as the CI/CD tool on your cloud instance of choice.
The Plan:
Create separate instances for test/staging/prod, each with Docker installed
Spin up Jenkins slave containers on each instance, which are controlled by Jenkins master
When a commit is sent to 'test' branch, Jenkins master sends task to 'Test' slave which ultimately spins up version of application
Similarly, after tests are successfully run and code is pushed to staging or prod branches, Jenkins will have branch-respective slave build application.
The Question(s):
What is wrong with this approach?
What can be improved by this approach?
There are a few questions you should ask yourself when taking on this approach, a lot of those are covered in this blogpost.
The final paragraph suggests exposing the docker socket to the CI container, allowing you to build images on the host machine, instead of inside the CI container, saving you from a lot of pains that come from running Docker in Docker.
Other questions you should probably ask are what would be the orchestration service used for controlling the master and slave containers. I had a great time following this blog post by Stelligent to quickly create all I needed on AWS ECS using a Cloudformation stack, but other solutions are obviously an option.
So all in all, I don't see anything wrong with your approach, as long as you exercise caution and follow best practices.
Good luck.