Category Archives: DevOps

What Is Jenkins X Boot And Why Do We Need It?

What's wrong with jx create cluster and jx install commands? Why do we need a different way to install, manage, and upgrade Jenkins X? Those are ad-hoc commands that do not follow GitOpts principles. They are not idempotent (you cannot run them multiple times and expect the same result). They are not stored in Git, at least not in a form that the system can interpret and consume in an attempt to converge the desired into the actual state. They are not declarative.

Continue reading →

“The DevOps 2.6 Toolkit: Jenkins X” is out

Leave a reply

After nine months of work, I managed to finish the latest book in The DevOps Toolkit Series. We're at the seventh book, and this time it's all about Jenkins X.

The book is called The DevOps 2.6 Toolkit: Jenkins X and the following few paragraphs is how it starts.

Continue reading →

Exploring Deployment Strategies In Kubernetes

Leave a reply

This time I will not write a lenghtly post. Instead, I'll try to explain different deployment strategies through diagrams. This is for all those who dislike black and white terminal and prefer colors, boxes, and lines with arrows.

The deployment strategies are not presented in any particular order.

Continue reading →

Running Serverless Deployments With Jenkins X, Gloo, And Knative

Leave a reply

Serverless deployments are gaining traction. Today, we have quite a few choices for converting our applications into serverless inside Kubernetes cluster. One of those, my favorite, is Knative. We'll explore how we can combine it with Jenkins X to create a fully automated continuous deployment pipeline that deploys serverless applications.

Continue reading →

Defining And Running Serverless Deployments With Knative And Jenkins X

Leave a reply

Jenkins X itself is serverless. That helps with many things, with better resource utilization and scalability being only a few of the benefits. Can we do something similar with our applications? Can we scale them to zero when no one is using them? Can we scale them up when the number of concurrent requests increases? Can we make our applications serverless?

Continue reading →

Overriding Pipelines, Stages, And Steps And Implementing Loops In Jenkins X Pipelines

Leave a reply

If you'd like to follow the examples, I will assume that you already have a cluster with serverless (Tekton-based) Jenkins X up-and-running.

Before we start exploring how to override different components in serverless Jenkins X pipelines, we'll create a new quickstart project so that we have a sample application to play with.

jx create quickstart \
    --language go \
    --project-name jx-go-loops \
    --batch-mode

Hopefully, this is not the first time you created a quick start project, and you are already familiar with the out-of-the-box pipeline our new application inherited from a build pack. Also, I will assume that you do understand that buildPack: go instruction in jenkins-x.yml means that the pipeline inherits all the steps defined in the corresponding build pack.

Our pipeline is currently building a Linux binary of our application before adding it to a container image. But what if we'd like to distribute the application also as executables for different operating systems? We could provide that same binary, but that would work only for Linux users since that is the architecture it is currently built for. We might want to extend the reach to Windows and MacOS users as well, and that would mean that we'd need to build two additional binaries. How could we do that?

Continue reading →

Ten Commandments Of GitOps Applied To Continuous Delivery

4 Replies

Applying GitOps Principles

Git is the de-facto code repository standard. Hardly anyone argues against that statement today. Where we might disagree is whether Git is the only source of truth, or even what we consider by that.

When I speak with teams and ask them whether Git is their only source of truth, almost everyone always answers yes. However, when I start digging, it usually turns out that's not true. Can you recreate everything using only the code in Git? By everything, I mean the whole cluster and everything running in it. Is your entire production system described in a single repository? If the answer to that question is yes, you are doing a great job, but we're not yet done with questioning. Can any change to your system be applied by making a pull request, without pressing any buttons in Jenkins or any other tool? If your answer is still yes, you are most likely already applying GitOps principles.

GitOps is a way to do Continuous Delivery. It assumes that Git is a single source of truth and that both infrastructure and applications are defined using the declarative syntax (e.g., YAML). Changes to infrastructure or applications are made by pushing changes to Git, not by clicking buttons in Jenkins.

Continue reading →

Upgrading Ingress Rules And Adding TLS Certificates With Jenkins X

Leave a reply

Without TLS certificates the applications we install are accessible through a plain HTTP protocol. As I'm sure you're aware, that is not acceptable. All public-facing applications should be available through HTTPS only, and that means that we need TLS certificates. We could generate them ourselves for each of the applications, but that would be too much work. Instead, we'll try to figure out how to create and manage the certificates automatically. Fortunately, Jenkins X already solved that and quite a few other Ingress-related challenges. We just need to learn how to tell jx what exactly we need.

Continue reading →

Implementing ChatOps With Jenkins X

Leave a reply

Jenkins X main logic is based on applying GitOps principles. Every change must be recorded in Git, and only Git is allowed to initiate events that result in changes in our clusters. That logic is the cornerstone of Jenkins X, and it served us well so far. However, there are actions we might need to perform that do not result in changes to the source code or configurations. Hence the emergence of ChatOps.

Continue reading →

Going Serverless With Jenkins X: Exploring Prow, Jenkins X Pipeline Operator, And Tekton

3 Replies

The serverless flavor of Jenkins X or, as some call it, Jenkins X Next Generation, is an attempt to redefine how we do continuous delivery and GitOps inside Kubernetes clusters. It does that by combining quite a few tools into a single easy-to-use bundle. As a result, most people will not have a need to understand intricacies of how the pieces work independently, nor how they are all integrated. Instead, many will merely push a change to Git and let the system do the rest. But, there are always those who would like to know what's happening behind the hood. To satisfy those craving for insight, we'll explore the processes and the components involved in the serverless Jenkins X platform. Understanding the flow of an event initiated by a Git webhook will give us insight into how the solution works and help us later on when we go deeper into each of the new components.

Continue reading →