Jenkins is an open source automation server. Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project. As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into a continuous delivery hub for any project.
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VMware Cloud Director
Score 7.8 out of 10
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VMware Cloud Director (formerly vCloud Director) is a cloud service-delivery platform used by cloud providers to operate and manage cloud-service businesses. The vendor states that by using VMware Cloud Director, cloud providers deliver secure, efficient, and elastic cloud resources to thousands of enterprises and IT teams across the world.
Jenkins helps the flow of build from the development team to the QA team. Can be really helpful in doing continuous builds, but when this feature is turned on the development team must have great communication otherwise the risk of broken builds become very high. In the long run, we found it made things easier when we just pushed the build manually and appointed a team member the build master.
For a CSP it's the best choice. For internal uses, even in presence of different business units, it's not so easy and flexible to manage. It assures a high level of multitenancy, often not needed for internal purposes. But it could be used in this case, just not created for these purposes. Network management is great.
Automatic jobs: there are infinite possibilities when it comes to Jenkins. You can run code against any testing suite you can imagine or conjure up. You can deploy applications at any time anywhere, automatically with no human intervention. If a certain stage fails, it will notify the team and your sysadmin of the issue so you can resolve it as quickly as possible
Automatic rollback: because of how Jenkins works, it can hold off publishing code and integrate locally to run QA procedures before pushing to deployment. This means that bugs are caught before your servers are updated and prevents a faulty program from affecting your downtime in the first place. Its a game changer for high availability.
The advantage to using vCloud Director is it a cloud based application allowing access anywhere. I have the ability to make changes to our virtual environment without being in the office or using a vpn.
The vCloud Director provides a lot of the same features as vSphere.
Once we organized a hackathon with our GitHub Storage. Jenkins was integrated at that time. We had a 20GB plan, but it oversized to 50GB. We had to bear a large sum of money which was unpredicted by our company. Being a startup we cannot bear such mistakes.
Jenkins cannot be easily studied and managed. We have to recruit personnel part-time for managing and servicing the server.
Though it is open source, there is no dedicated community driven forum or support. There are 3rd party discussion and support portals. Thus, we use Gitter always for debugging and solutions.
It is not good for end users or customers to use. The UI is geared more towards VMware admins.
There is somewhat of a learning curve to it, you have to think through and plan out how you want to set your OVDC and PVDCs up. It takes a lot of architecture experience.
Once you built workloads in vCloud director, it's real difficult to take them out or manage them directly in vSphere. This is a huge pain.
Sometimes I feel like I am using software developed at the '90s. The Jenkins functioning is amazing. It fulfills its role, but when we are talking about the user interface, it is something painful sometimes, and unfortunately, I didn't see investment and/or improvement on this part over the past few years. Another thing I couldn't forget to mention is about the ecosystem around Jenkins, there are a bunch of plugins, but due to this flexibility, we caught ourselves struggling with broken plugins several times.
There is a large development community - but it is shifting as people move towards other tools. A lot of companies still use Jenkins and will build propriety tools, which doesn't help any of the open-source community. Jenkins has a lot of help and support online, but other, more modern, alternatives will have better support for newer tech.
We previously utilized Hudson - which was limited and did not have the extensive plugin abilities of Jenkins. We selected Jenkins for it's ease of use, beautiful interface, and stability. Other software such as Hudson and Bamboo didn't provide these abilities.
Hyper-V is built on a Windows platform that includes services not needed for the virtual environment adding overhead. With vCloud I'm not required to maintain a host OS or it's updates. The requirement to maintain storage devices is no longer needed with vCloud as well.
Low investment: As the software is open source, there is no purchase required for on-premises installations, and there is a low barrier to entry for companies offering hosted solutions. This leads to competition on price, and therefore lower prices.
Saves time by automating manual tasks: There are often a lot of repetitive tasks that need to be done to prepare for a release, and Jenkins enables these tasks to be run easily and frequently (for example, running tasks on every pull request)
Near-immediate returns: Spend a day or two and easily automate most common tasks. Reports are visible so that managers and team leads can keep an eye on code quality.
