The popular but troubled Jenkins CI/CD system is being reworked to support cloud-native applications on the Kubernetes container-orchestration platform. The Jenkins X project is a response to user concerns that Jenkins had lost its luster and had developed configuration and stability issues.
Jenkins X is intended for Kubernetes users who want to adopt CI/CD or who want CI/CD and are moving to the cloud, without necessarily knowing anything about Kubernetes. Jenkins X builds on Jenkins with open source tools, promoting a Git branching and a repository model. A Jenkins distribution is used as the core CI/CD engine.
Other features planned for the Jenkins X project include:
- Automation, with Jenkins defaulting to CI/CD pipelines for projects.
- Pull-request preview environments, to get feedback before changes are merged to the master version of a piece of software. Feedback is provided by Jenkins X as code is ready to be previewed.
- A set of environments for each team, with Jenkins X automating the management of environments and the promotion of new versions.
- More integrations with Git providers. Right now, Jenkins X supports GitHub but integrations are under consideration for Bitbucket and Gerrit Code Review.
Jenkins X is a project of the newly formed Continuous Delivery Foundation, a Linux Foundation effort dedicated to continuous delivery and promoting an ecosystem of interoperable tools for software delivery.
You can download the Jenkins X source code from the project’s GitHub page.