What are the top DevOps tools, platforms, and services we should use in 2023?
Continue readingThe Best DevOps Tools, Platforms, And Services In 2023?
Leave a reply
Tag Archives: jenkins
Running Jenkins In Kubernetes – Tutorial And Review
Should we be using Jenkins for our Kubernetes CI/CD pipeline needs in 2021? How to deploy Jenkins in k8s? How to run Jenkins builds in Kubernetes? How would a full CI/CD pipeline look like?
Continue readingDeploying Jenkins To A Kubernetes Cluster Using Helm
This article is an excerpt from The DevOps 2.4 Toolkit: Continuous Deployment To Kubernetes. It assumes that you already have a Kubernetes cluster with nginx Ingress. The article was tested with minikube, minishift, Docker for Mac/Windows, AWS with kops, and GKE. Furthermore, I will assume that you already installed Helm. Finally, I expect you to clone vfarcic/k8s-specs and execute the commands from inside it.
First things first… We need to find out the IP of our cluster or external LB if available. The commands that follow will differ from one cluster type to another.
Continue reading
Blueprint Of A Self-Sufficient Docker Cluster
The article that follows is an extract from the last chapter of The DevOps 2.2 Toolkit: Self-Sufficient Docker Clusters book. It provides a good summary into the processes and tools we explored in the quest to build a self-sufficient cluster that can (mostly) operate without humans.
We split the tasks that a self-sufficient system should perform into those related to services and those oriented towards infrastructure. Even though some of the tools are used in both groups, the division between the two allowed us to keep a clean separation between infrastructure and services running on top of it.
Continue reading
Auto-Scaling Docker Swarm Services Using Instrumented Metrics
If you prefer reading, please visit Auto-Scaling Docker Swarm Services Using Instrumented Metrics tutorial from Docker Flow Monitor documentation. Otherwise, feel free to watch the video that follows.
The DevOps 2.2 Toolkit: Self-Sufficient Docker Clusters
The article you just read is the summary of the progress we made in The DevOps 2.2 Toolkit: Self-Healing Docker Clusters. You can find the hands-on exercises that build the system in the book.
If you liked this article, you might be interested in The DevOps 2.2 Toolkit: Self-Sufficient Docker Clusters book. The book goes beyond Docker and schedulers and tries to explore ways for building self-adaptive and self-healing Docker clusters. If you are a Docker user and want to explore advanced techniques for creating clusters and managing services, this book might be just what you’re looking for.
Please get a copy from Amazon, LeanPub, or look for it through your favorite book seller.
Give the book a try and let me know what you think.
Automating Jenkins Docker Setup
Jenkins is, by far, the most used CI/CD tool in the market. That comes as no surprise since it’s been around for a while, it has one of the biggest open source communities, it has enterprise version for those who need it, and it is straightforward to extend it to suit (almost) anyone’s needs.
Products that dominate the market for years tend to be stable and very feature rich. Jenkins is no exception. However, with age come some downsides as well. In the case of Jenkins, automation setup is one of the things that has a lot to be desired. If you need Jenkins to serve as an orchestrator of your automation and tasks, you’ll find it to be effortless to use. But, if you need to automate Jenkins itself, you’ll realize that it is not as smooth as you’d expect from modern tools. Never the less, Jenkins setup can be automated, and we’ll go through one possible solution.
Continue reading
Running Fault Tolerant Jenkins Inside A Docker Swarm Cluster
In this article, we’ll discuss a way to create a Jenkins service inside a Docker Swarm cluster and some of the benefits such a service provides.
Continue reading
The Short History of CI/CD Tools
Jenkins (forked from Hudson after a dispute with Oracle) has been around for a long time and established itself as the leading platform for the creation of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery/deployment (CD) pipelines. The idea behind it is that we should create jobs that perform certain operations like building, testing, deploying, and so on. Those jobs should be chained together to create a CI/CD pipeline. The success was so big that other products followed its lead and we got Bamboo, Team City, and others. They all used a similar logic of having jobs and chaining them together. Operations, maintenance, monitoring, and the creation of jobs is mostly done through their UIs. However, none of the other products managed to suppress Jenkins due to its strong community support. There are over one thousand plugins and one would have a hard time imagining a task that is not supported by, at least, one of them. The support, flexibility, and extensibility featured by Jenkins allowed it to maintain its reign as the most popular and widely used CI/CD tool throughout all this time. The approach based on heavy usage of UIs can be considered the first generation of CI/CD tools (even though there were others before).
Continue reading
The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit
Today is an exciting day for me. I just decided that the book I spent the last eight months writing is ready for general public.
What made me write the book? Certainly not the promise of wealth since, as any author of technical books will confirm, there is no money that can compensate the number of hours involved in writing a technical book. The reasons behind this endeavor are of a different nature. I realized that this blog is a great way for me to explore different subjects and share my experience with the community. However, due to the format, blog posts do not give enough space to explore, in more details, subjects I’m passionate about so, around eight months ago, I decided to start working on The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit: Automating the Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containerized Microservices book. It treats similar subjects as those I write about in this blog, but with much more details. More importantly, the book allowed me to organize my experience into a much more coherent story.
The book is about different techniques that help us architect software in a better and more efficient way with microservices packed as immutable containers, tested and deployed continuously to servers that are automatically provisioned with configuration management tools. It’s about fast, reliable and continuous deployments with zero-downtime and ability to roll-back. It’s about scaling to any number of servers, designing self-healing systems capable of recuperation from both hardware and software failures and about centralized logging and monitoring of the cluster.
In other words, this book envelops the whole microservices development and deployment lifecycle using some of the latest and greatest practices and tools. We’ll use Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Ubuntu, Docker Swarm and Docker Compose, Consul, etcd, Registrator, confd, Jenkins, and so on. We’ll go through many practices and, even more, tools.
At this moment, around 70% is finished and you’ll receive regular updates if you decide to purchase the book. The truth is that my motivation for writing the book is the same as with this blog. I like sharing my experience and this book is one more way to accomplish that. You can set your own price and if you feel that the minimum amount is still too high, please send me a private message and I’ll get back to you with a free copy.
Please give The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit: Automating the Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containerized Microservices a try and let me know what you think. Any feedback is welcome and appreciated.
Blue-Green Deployment To Docker Swarm with Jenkins Workflow Plugin
The idea behind this article is to explore ways to deploy releases with Jenkins to Docker Swarm without downtime. We’ll use blue-green procedure. More info about the process and one possible implementation can be found in the Blue-Green Deployment, Automation and Self-Healing Procedure article. One of the downsides of the process we used in that article is Ansible itself. While it is probably the best tool for provisioning and orchestration, it had some downsides when we tried to use it as the tool to deploy containers. This is especially evident when the process is complex. Ansible lacks some constructs common in most programming languages. This time we’ll try to implement the same process but using the Jenkins Workflow Plugin that was developed and contributed to Jenkins open source project by CloudBees.
Continue reading
Technology Conversations 