CloudBees has introduced CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise, a Jenkins distribution aimed directly at enterprises. This distribution ensures the highest levels of testing and verification, providing smooth upgrades and the most reliable and stable Jenkins foundation for software development and DevOps teams.
This enterprise distribution of Jenkins is possible, due to CloudBees’ new comprehensive testing and verification process called the CloudBees Assurance Program. CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise provides a stable and certified distribution of Jenkins, along with curated extensions from the community and third parties; all of which are now certified as part of the distribution. As DevOps needs rapidly evolve, enterprises require confidence that they are implementing the most feature-rich, reliable and secure Jenkins-based continuous delivery platform possible. As of today, they have it!
Key to all successful open source platforms is their ability to add features and integrate with third-party tools and solutions, through extensions. As the use of those platforms grow, the increasing number of extensions from a wide number of sources places a significant maintenance challenge on enterprises. While individual extensions may be stable, the large number of extensions bundled in combination with each other can cause a combinatorial explosion of possible versions and issues. This challenge gets even more complicated as users have to move from one version of their entire setup, to the next. Such a challenge requires support and testing that goes well beyond what any enterprise can and wants to do on their own.
As a remedy, open source software vendors have all adopted the same solution: the delivery of a vendor-provided distribution, combining a curated list of fully-tested and interoperable extensions, providing a stable runtime environment as well as a safe migration path to future versions of that distribution. Examples include Red Hat (RHEL/Fedora and JBoss/Wildfly), Acquia (Drupal), Mulesoft (Mule ESB) and Hortonworks (Hadoop). CloudBees’ implementation of the same methodology, applied to open source components, is now being made available as the CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise distribution.
Jenkins is used extensively in enterprise environments and 92% of users in the 2015 State of Jenkins Community Survey1 classified their Jenkins installation as mission-critical. One of the biggest strengths of Jenkins is its extensibility. Community contributors easily extend Jenkins with features and enable it to connect to virtually any tool used throughout the continuous delivery pipeline. However, until now, the community extensions, individually and especially in combination with each other, have not been tested and verified with the same level of rigor that the CloudBees team provides for the Jenkins core. Now, in a single distribution, CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise includes a thoroughly tested Jenkins core and a set of the most popular community plugins.
In order to establish its new CloudBees Assurance Program, CloudBees has invested in leading edge engineering, QA and machine resources dedicated to verifying the stability, security, inter-compatibility and upgradability of the Jenkins’ core along with a set of the most popular open source Jenkins extensions. As part of its CloudBees Assurance Program, any issue that is found in open source code will be fixed first in the open source and then propagated back into the CloudBees distribution.
The new program creates a highly dependable Jenkins distribution in several critical ways:
- Comprehensive, end-to-end verification of Jenkins core components that removes the risk of untested open source software.
- Verification of open source and third-party extensions for functionality, interoperability and security provides a curated and vetted set of functionality against a typical set of use cases to ensure success. This curated set of extensions are not just tested to be stable on their own, but are verified to ensure they are all interoperable with each other.
- Smooth and problem-free upgrade experience when upgrading from one version of the distribution to the next, with the choice of two different release channels: a Fixed delivery mode which will focus solely on stability and security improvements; and a Rolling monthly drop that ensures users get the newest functionality faster and with verified quality, as well as stability and security improvements.
“Open source software provides the fastest innovation and taps the immense power of many talented, passionate and creative developers dedicated to solving hard problems, but their focus is rarely on enterprise capabilities or consumability,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder, CloudBees. “CloudBees joins other industry leaders like Red Hat - with their Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution – who have addressed this long-standing problem by providing enterprise customers with extensively vetted and certified solutions that secure and stabilize critical open source projects like Jenkins.”
