Cloud Platform - Jenkins and Docker

Cloud platform has made the way for programmable infrastructure, which brought automation into SDLC. The ability to make provision of resources, configuring them dynamically, deploying applications and monitoring the entire process have led to the DevOps culture where developers and the operators are collaborating throughout the application delivery lifecycle.

Chef, Puppet, and Ansible are best of the tools for provisioning and configuration. Another software that is crucial for success of DevOps is Jenkins.

Application build, followed by packaging and deployment play a crucial role in release & configuration management. Developers relied on tools like Ant, Maven to compile. Jenkins comes to the rescue of Dev teams. By automating the build process, Jenkins can well coordinate complex workflows required by teams. By integrating with the source code control system, Jenkins can invoke multiple build processes targeting different environments. The output of this process would result in a set of executables exes, or jar files depending on the platform. Jenkins can invoke simple shell scripts to perform pre-build and post-build tasks. This option enables software like node.js, python to take benefit of build automation.

Docker is a preferred environment for software development and testing. DevOps teams find it to more be efficient to configure development and test environments based on Docker. So, instead of deploying the final set of artifacts such as exe / jar files to the target environment, ops teams can now package the entire application as a Docker Image. This image shares the same build version tag before being published to a central registry. It can then be picked up by various environments viz development, testing, and production for final deployment.

DevOps teams are greatly helped by using combination of Jenkins and Docker. The tight integration with source code control mechanisms such as Git, Jenkins can initiate a build process each time a developer commits his code. This process results in a new Docker image which is instantly available across environments.

You cannot ignore Docker, it’s time to include it in the DevOps strategy.