CloudBees, the steward of the Jenkins DevOps platform, has teamed up with partners to provide managed Jenkins services, as well as new security features and database support.
The Jenkins DevOps world has recently gained a series of new services, including advisory and managed services, new security capabilities and database support.
For instance, among the new Jenkins services, CloudBees recently delivered a new, free service, CloudBees Jenkins Advisor, which will analyze any Jenkins continuous delivery environment and provide users with information on issues and performance.
Looking for a Jenkins CI quickstart? These concise and easy to follow Jenkins tutorials will quickly get you on your way towards mastering the popular continuous integration and continuous delivery tool.
Learn Jenkins fast: A continuous integration quickstart
Announced at the company's Jenkins World conference at the end of August, CloudBees Jenkins Advisor identifies potential issues and advises organizations on corrective actions that can be taken to prevent problems that might affect software delivery, uptime or performance. The service is based on an expansive knowledge base CloudBees has amassed over the years.
"We want to ensure that developers get the best, smoothest experience out of Jenkins. Outages, performance issues and other problems can hurt people's confidence in software delivery automation," said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Jenkins' founder and CTO at CloudBees, based in San Jose, Calif., in a statement. "With CloudBees Jenkins Advisor, we can proactively identify potential issues for our users in Jenkins, administrators can nip problems in the bud and everyone can focus on other, more important things."
DevOps Managed Services
We want to ensure that developers get the best, smoothest experience out of Jenkins. Outages, performance issues and other problems can hurt people's confidence in software delivery automation.
Kohsuke KawaguchiJenkins founder and CTO at CloudBees
Meanwhile, for those interested in managed Jenkins services, CloudBees also introduced DevOps Managed Services, an offering delivered by managed service providers (MSPs) and powered by CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise -- the company's enterprise-grade Jenkins implementation.
CloudBees has certified five MSPs -- with whom it will provide technical expertise and 24/7 support -- that will provide CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise as a managed service. The initial group of partners providing managed Jenkins services includes CloudHesive, Digital OnUs, iTMethods, Microland and TriNimbus.
Stas Zvinyatskovsky, managing director of modern engineering at Accenture, said the company began its DevOps journey 15 years ago, as it started centralizing a build-and-release infrastructure for its teams.
The company eventually standardized on Jenkins and found its greatest DevOps challenge to be scale.
"We have 400,000-plus employees and 25,000 unique users on our infrastructure, and they have their unique needs," Zvinyatskovsky said. "We solve that by running CloudBees at the core as the engine. We also have our own Accenture DevOps platform, ADOP [Accenture DevOps Platform], that allows us to repeatedly and reliably deploy continuous delivery pipelines from team to team with best practices codified in those pipelines."
DevOps security testing
For its part, Checkmarx, an application security software company, introduced a new release of its Interactive Application Security Testing product, CxIAST. The product enables continuous application security testing in real time, so software delivery schedules are not affected by security testing.
In addition to CxIAST, the Checkmarx application security platform features a secure coding platform known as Codebashing, a static application security testing tool known as CxSAST and an open source analysis tool known as CxOSA, which all complement each other.
Maty Siman, CTO and founder of Checkmarx, said the company's application security platform "correlates data and results from all Checkmarx products across the software development lifecycle and then leverages that information intelligently to generate fast, accurate and actionable results."
DevOps to the database
Finally, Datical, a provider of database release automation technology, has delivered a plug-in that brings DevOps to the database.
The Datical integration for Jenkins enables users to access Datical DB's database release automation capabilities directly from Jenkins, without having to write scripts or command lines. The integration of Datical and Jenkins enables users to bring continuous integration to their database changes, the company said.
Pete Pickerill, vice president of product strategy and co-founder of Datical in Austin, Texas, said the plug-in allows development teams to manage database releases the same way they manage application releases.
Moreover, CloudBees' Kawaguchi said a common challenge for Jenkins users moving to continuous delivery is how to handle the database.
Thus, "It's great to see Datical integrating their technology with Jenkins Pipeline to give Jenkins users the tools to solve one of the harder problems in continuous delivery," he said in a statement.
