Updates on DevOps and CI/CD support for Jenkins

With DevOps World | Jenkins World around the corner (September 16-19 in San Francisco) and the recent announcement of Azure DevOps, this seems like a good time to provide an update on the options for working with Jenkins on Microsoft Azure.

Side note: if you’re at DevOps World | Jenkins World, come visit us at our booth, attend our workshop, and check out sessions by my fellow Microsoft CDA Jessica Deen and myself. Now… the updates and Jenkins resources:

Continuous integration and deployment tools for Azure

If you work with Jenkins, Microsoft has developed a set of plugins at https://plugins.jenkins.io/.  These plugins help you to run Jenkins on Azure Linux and Windows VMs, Kubernetes, Azure App Service, as well as deploy artifacts to those Azure platforms and more.  All are open source and available on GitHub.

For example, you can provision and manage Azure Virtual Machines as Jenkins Agents with the Jenkins Agent Plugin for Azure. You can also deploy build artifacts to several destinations, including cloud storage using the Azure Storage plugin for Jenkins.

Microsoft has been working with Jenkins to build these plugins, and they are in use every day to produce Jenkins!  You can see the Jenkins build and test process live at https://ci.jenkins.io/.

Microsoft has also partnered with CloudBees to deliver the CloudBees Core to the Azure Marketplace.  It’s a packaging of a core Jenkins platform supported by CloudBees, plus advanced enterprise features that secure and optimize Jenkins. CloudBees Core runs on enterprise-grade Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and the CloudBees Core Jenkins Platform is compatible with open source Jenkins and all Jenkins community plugins. Learn more on the CloudBees Blog.

Azure DevOps Integration with Jenkins

Microsoft has recently announced Azure DevOps, which support Jenkins in a variety of ways. If you’ve invested in Jenkins as your CI/CD infrastructure, you can still protect your investment while getting added value from integrating with the 5 core Azure DevOps services that are not available in core Jenkins alone:

• Azure Repos – Anybody like free private git repos?  That’s just one feature.  Also support for your favorite IDEs and integration with Jenkins.
• Azure Test Plans – a powerful exploratory testing solution.
• Azure Boards – Hosted, powerful work tracking with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting.
• Azure Pipelines – Deploy from Jenkins to integrate your free private Azure DevOps repos with and integrated CI/CD that works with your language, platform, and cloud.
• Azure Artifacts – Maven, npm, and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources.  Pass deployments to Jenkins with ease.

Visual Studio Code integration with Jenkins and Azure DevOps

Jenkins also has several community-developed plugins for Visual Studio Code, Microsoft’s popular free, open source text editor.  You can see the latest by searching Jenkins at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com.

Documentation, tips, and tricks

Microsoft is all about supporting your favorite technologies, even if your investments are in non-Microsoft technology.  Here are just a few of the documents and examples that we’ve authored to get Jenkins users started on Azure:

Getting Started with Jenkins on Azure:

About Jenkins on Azure

Jenkins architecture

Create a Jenkins server

Secure Jenkins on Azure

Sample jobs and scripts

Deploying to Linux and Windows VMs:

CI/CD to Linux VMs

Scale with Azure VM agents

Deploying to containers and Kubernetes:

Build using Azure Container Instances

CI/CD to Kubernetes

Deploy to AKS using blue/green pattern

Deploying to Azure App Service:

CI/CD to Azure App Service

Use the App Service plugin

Using Plugins, Integration with Azure DevOps and Microsoft Service Fabric:

Publish to Azure Storage

Deploy Microsoft Service Fabric apps

Sign up for free and let us know how it’s going

If you’re new to Azure, newbies can check out Azure via a free trial.  And, if you’re new to Azure DevOps, sign up for free private Git Repos, 10 free parallel jobs, and unlimited minutes for your open source projects here.

If you’re using Jenkins on Azure, we want to hear from you about how you’re using it. Please let us know if you have a project that may be a useful reference case for others.

Other questions? Let us know in the comments.

Brian Benz

Brian is a Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft, helping Java developers to get the most out of Azure. Before Joining Microsoft, he was a solution architect, consultant, developer, author and presenter at IBM, Deloitte, and other companies.

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