Jenkins is an open source automation server offering hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project. It is offered through the Jenkins project, comprised of a community of practitioners and support companies.
The Jenkins project has now announced the availability of Jenkins 2.0, the first major release after 10 years and 655 weekly releases, Updates to core Jenkins capabilities include support for continuous delivery (CD) pipelines, clear visibility of delivery stages and enhancements to help users get started more quickly.
Jenkins 2 is a drop-in replacement of the Jenkins 1.x series of releases and fully backward compatible. Jenkins 2.0 updates include:
Continuous Delivery Pipeline Support
The Pipeline plugins provide orchestration of all stages of the software delivery process, with enhanced visibility and feedback. Jenkins 2.0 has several updates to support continuous delivery pipelines including:
- Pipeline-as-Code enables teams to quickly create and collaborate on simple to advanced CD pipelines using code.
- Stage View enables teams to visualize, collaborate and act on the application delivery value stream in real time.
- Pipeline Durability ensures that long-running pipelines withstand outages by resuming at the point of interruption, significantly improving productivity.
- Multibranch provides automatic, zero-configuration of CD pipelines for new branches and pull-requests.
Usability Enhancements
Jenkins 2.0 includes several enhancements that make it easier to use, and enable users to quickly be more effective:
- Get started more quickly with community-recommended plugins: A new quick start UI provides solution-oriented plugin bundles. These are the most commonly-used plugins, selected from the more than 1,000 available plugins, to enable a fast start for new installations.
- Better user experience: Jenkins 2.0 includes enhanced configuration pages and other UI updates to make configuring and using Jenkins more efficient.
- Upgrade confidently: Today millions of users depend on Jenkins, making backwards compatibility a primary concern. Jenkins 2.0 is designed as a drop-in replacement for Jenkins 1.x.
- New community website: In response to the rapidly growing Jenkins community, the new Jenkins website makes it easier for new users to get started with Jenkins, encourages user contribution and increases visibility into Jenkins events.