Item: Jenkins
Rating: 8
Author: Sagiv Frankel

Overall Satisfaction with Jenkins

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Jenkins is as our R&D build and deploy pipeline.
It allows us to:
1) Run end to end and unit tests every time we push new code.
2) Compile and bundle our code.
3) Deploy images and containers it to our Azure servers (Kubernetes).
4) Give us a nice dashboard to view that status of the tests, builds, and deployment.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It is heavily used in the industry and it's open source. This is a huge benefit as there is a lot of learning material and more importantly there are many friends that can help you set things up correctly.
The new UI/UX design is very user friendly and gives you good viability into your deployment pipeline status.
Lots of helpful plugins that are well supported.
Setup on Azure was quite straight forward.

Cons

It does require setup unlike other SaaS products like CircleCI which just require an account.
Lots of plugins is also a disadvantage as you need to install quite a few and installation errors are not always easy to decipher.
The UI could use better search options, especially through the logs.

Return on Investment

Having a CI/CD pipeline, in general, helps you push new features faster and more reliably.
In the short term - a large setup cost.
Long-term - no cost for SaaS products.

Alternatives Considered

CircleCI

I had experienced some outages and bugs with CircleCI which can be very frustrating since you don't have control over the software.

Other Software Used

CircleCI, GitHub, Trello, Nanobox

Likelihood to Recommend

If you haven't used Jenkins before and have a relatively simple and straightforward deployment setup I would not use my resources on Jenkins and go for a simpler, more SaaS-based solution. If you expect to have a lot of security demands and need control of your CI/CD pipeline I would use Jenkins for the get-go.

Comments

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Jenkins - when you want a dedicated, non SaaS CI/CD