CloudBees, Inc., the Jenkins Enterprise company and continuous delivery leader, today announced Jenkins Workflow, a significant new facility for Jenkins. The new Workflow facility enables Jenkins to orchestrate development and deployment processes in continuous delivery environments. CloudBees led the development effort for the Jenkins Workflow project, initially defining requirements for it based on input from the Jenkins CI community. Jenkins Workflow is available for developer preview and is being developed in the Jenkins community as an open source plugin.
Using Jenkins Workflow, users can now define workflow processes in a single place, avoiding the need to coordinate flows across multiple build jobs. This can be particularly important in complex enterprise environments, where work, releases and dependencies must be coordinated across teams. The workflow facility enables teams to re-use and share workflows, which in turn encourages coordination and visibility across a continuous delivery pipeline.
"As Jenkins has broadened its mission to go beyond continuous integration and as the sophisticated users of Jenkins talk to each other in the community, it became clear that we could make Jenkins drastically simpler, more powerful and flexible in order to manage complex delivery pipelines," said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, creator of Jenkins and CTO of CloudBees. "I'm pleased that we are implementing this major new piece of functionality for Jenkins and I'm proud of the CloudBees' team's contribution to lead the way in an open manner. Now that we have a foundation for managing workflows efficiently within Jenkins, I'm looking forward to even more aggressive community involvement in this area."
Kawaguchi and Jesse Glick, lead developer at CloudBees, drove the development of the Jenkins Workflow plugin core functionality. They leveraged CloudBees' resources for the effort and encouraged developers to extend the technology even further. Kawaguchi also said CloudBees plans to develop additional features for the CloudBees Continuous Delivery Platform, which will build on the new workflow functionality.
"Jenkins has a number of ways to ‘chain' projects together - to create triggers, promotions, copied artifacts, etc.," added Glick, who will lead a "Workflow in Jenkins" session Wednesday, June 18, at the JUC 2014 US East conference in Boston. "However, assembling these into a complex continuous deployment pipeline can be painful. Organisations needed a new way to streamline these workflow capabilities, and we think this offering will give them what they're looking for."
The functionality provided by Jenkins Workflow is extensive and provides developers and IT operations personnel the complete tools necessary to orchestrate activities that are:
Complex - Complex workflows can be defined within a single build job in Jenkins
Long-running - Jenkins Workflow allows jobs to survive restarts of Jenkins masters and slaves
Non-sequential - It is simple to define jobs to run in parallel and to control the flow of jobs
Pausable - Job execution can be gated by both human and external system interactions
Retryable - When failures occur, steps can be retried to avoid restarting a job from scratch
