Category Archives: Jenkins X

Choosing The Right Deployment Strategy

Deployment strategies affect everyone, no matter whether we are focused only on a single aspect of the application lifecycle or we are in full control. The way we deploy affects the architecture, testing, monitoring, and many other aspects. And not only that, but we can say that architecture, testing, and monitoring affect the way we deploy. All those things are closely related and affect each other.

We’ll discuss different deployment strategies and answer a couple of questions. Is your application stateful or stateless? Does its architecture permit scaling? How do you roll back? How do you scale up and down? Do you need your application to run always? Should you use Kubernetes Deployments instead of, let’s say, StatefulSets? Answers to those questions will not serve much unless we are familiar with some of the most commonly used deployment strategies. Not only that knowledge will help us choose which one to pick, but they might even influence the architecture of our applications.

DevOps Toolkit Books And Courses: https://www.devopstoolkitseries.com/
DevOps Paradox Podcast: https://www.devopsparadox.com/

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Deploying A New Canary Release Using Jenkins X

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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.

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“The DevOps 2.6 Toolkit: Jenkins X” is out

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.

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Running Serverless Deployments With Jenkins X, Gloo, And Knative

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.

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Defining And Running Serverless Deployments With Knative And Jenkins X

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?

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

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?

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Implementing ChatOps With Jenkins X

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.
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