CloudBees Introduces GUI for Jenkins X as the Project's Popularity Grows

CloudBees has introduced the first GUI for the open source Jenkins X project. The rollout comes as momentum for Jenkins X grows with downloads, contributors and corporate support hit all-time highs.

by Tom Donoghue

Tags: CI/CD, cloud-native, CloudBees, DevOps, Jenkins X, Kubernetes, pipelines,

CloudBees, a provider of enterprise DevOps solutions, has introduced the first GUI for the open source Jenkins X project. The rollout comes as momentum grows for Jenkins X -- with downloads, contributors and corporate support all hitting all-time highs.

 

Jenkins X offers automated CI/CD for cloud-native applications on Kubernetes. Using Jenkins X, developers can leverage Kubernetes to build and deploy cloud-native applications quickly and easily without having to learn the intricacies of Kubernetes and its ecosystem. 

 

Jenkins X has become popular thanks in part to its features that help teams collaborate and accelerate their software delivery at any scale. Notable features include pipeline automation, built-in GitOps, and ‘preview’ environments, according to users.  

 

The Jenkins X project, initiated by CloudBees and other contributors in February 2018, is now part of the Continuous Delivery Foundation.

 

In less than two years, approximately 885 developers have contributed code to the Jenkins X project, and there are 176 contributing companies (Source: Continuous Delivery Foundation DevStats, October 2019).

 

Mo Plassnig, vice president of cloud at CloudBees, said of the growing adoption of and contributions for Jenkins X.

 

"Our goal is to make Jenkins X the most friction-free environment for developers looking to use Kubernetes in an opinionated, automated way. Offering a richer, more intuitive GUI is just the start.” Plassnig also thanked ongoing contributors, noting such work has helped Jenkins X improve log handling, environment promotions, onboarding of workflows and more.  

 

Another active Jenkins X supporter is Mauricio Salatino, an instructor at Learnk8s. He noted his experience with Jenkins X.

This screen displays a column view of application environments and the various stages of each (dev, staging, production, etc). Users can add / remove stages, and also perform actions such as: access previews of their environments, promote and rollback. As we continue to add features to these workflows it will allow our users to easily manage environments and diagnose issues when necessary.

"As a software developer in charge of migrating monoliths to microservices deployed to Kubernetes, Jenkins X has helped me and my teams to be efficient in managing complex projects that require 100+ source code repositories to be deployed to different Kubernetes clusters. This was a task that initially looked impossible for a team of just four people, but we did it easily with Jenkins X."

 

The newly-added GUI is expected to support these popular Jenkins X features: 

  • Automated CI/CD: Rather than having to have in-depth knowledge of the internals of Jenkins X Pipeline, Jenkins X will default efficient and accurate pipelines for projects that implement CI and CD fully.
  • Environment Promotion via GitOps: Each team gets a set of Environments. Jenkins X then automates the management of the Environments and the Promotion of new versions of Applications between Environments via GitOps
  • Pull Request Preview Environments: Jenkins X automatically spins up Preview Environments for your Pull Requests so you can get fast feedback before changes are merged to master
  • Feedback on Issues and Pull Requests: Jenkins X automatically comments on your Commits, Issues and Pull Requests with feedback as code is ready to be previewed, is promoted to environments or if Pull Requests are generated automatically to upgrade versions.

 

Referring to the growing popularity of Jenkins X, project co-founder James Strachan stated:


“The numbers show that our vision for Jenkins X was right on target. As more organizations embrace DevOps, the need for a CI/CD solution that leverages the power of Kubernetes with the rich capabilities and straight-forward convenience of Jenkins X has continued to grow.”

 

Strachan is also a distinguished engineer at CloudBees.

 

Readers can download the free CloudBees Jenkins X Distribution and get the new




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