Jenkins Overview
Jenkins is one of the most popular self-managed open source build automation and CI/CD developer tools in the world. It derives its incredible flexibility from incorporating capabilities from hundreds of available plugins, enabling it to support building, deploying, and automating any project.
It’s important to understand that Jenkins is not the same as CloudBees. CloudBees is the company that primarily maintains Jenkins. The four products used by the Jenkins community are:
- Jenkins Open Source
- Jenkins X
- CloudBees Jenkins Distribution
- CloudBees Core
Jenkins Open Source natively supports application building, artifact packaging, application testing, and pull requests. Extending the native functionality of Jenkins to support Continuous Delivery is done through plugins.
Jenkins X is meant to make running a pipeline out of the box with Kubernetes easier. Jenkins X natively integrates Jenkins CI/CD server, Kubernetes, Helm, and other tools to offer a prescriptive CI/CD pipeline with best practices built-in, such as using GitOps to manage environments. It deploys Jenkins into Kubernetes containers to get around the complexities of installing and integrating Jenkins. However, it is a complex pairing of many tools including the fragile Jenkins server.
CloudBees Core is a distinct product built on top of open source Jenkins and is a paid tool. CloudBees CI has two components: the Client Master and the Operations Center. The Client Master is a Jenkins master, whose main function is to coordinate the building of projects such as Pipelines. When a CloudBees CI installation consists of two or more Client Masters, it is usually a good idea to install an Operations Center instance to manage these Client Masters.
CloudBees Jenkins Distribution is free software that provides developers with a Jenkins environment built on the most recent supported Jenkins release. The distribution comes with a recommended catalog of tested plugins available through the CloudBees Assurance Program.
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Built-in CI/CD
GitLab has built-in Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, for free, no need to install it separately. Use it to build, test, and deploy your website (GitLab Pages) or webapp. The job results are displayed on merge requests for easy access. |
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GitLab Self-monitoring
GitLab comes out of the box enabled for Prometheus monitoring with extensive instrumentation, making it easy to ensure your GitLab deployment is responsive and healthy. |
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Project Level Value Stream Analytics
GitLab provides a dashboard that lets teams measure the time it takes to go from planning to monitoring. GitLab can provide this data because it has all the tools built-in: from the idea, to the CI, to code review, to deploy to production. |
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Group Level Value Stream Analytics
GitLab provides a group dashboard that lets teams measure the time it takes to go from planning to monitoring. GitLab can provide this data because it has all the tools built-in: from the idea, to the CI, to code review, to deploy to production. |
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Built-in Container Registry
GitLab Container Registry is a secure and private registry for Docker images. It allows for easy upload and download of images from GitLab CI. It is fully integrated with Git repository management. (Codefresh will be ending their support for private docker registries as of May 1, 2020 |
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Preview your changes with Review Apps
With GitLab CI/CD you can create a new environment for each one of your branches, speeding up your development process. Spin up dynamic environments for your merge requests with the ability to preview your branch in a live environment. Review Apps support both static and dynamic URLs. |
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CI/CD Horizontal Autoscaling
GitLab CI/CD cloud native architecture can easily scale horizontally by adding new nodes if the workload increases. GitLab Runners can automatically spin up and down new containers to ensure pipelines are processed immediately and minimize costs. |
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Operations Dashboard
Visualize the history and current status of pipelines across projects and groups all in a single dashboard that can be customized for each user. Learn more about Cross-Project Pipelines in the Operations Dashboard |
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Built for using containers and Docker
GitLab ships with its own Container Registry, Docker CI Runner, and is ready for a complete CI/CD container workflow. There is no need to install, configure, or maintain additional plugins. |
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Cloud Native
GitLab and its CI/CD is Cloud Native, purpose built for the cloud model. GitLab can be easily deployed on Kubernetes and used to deploy your application to Kubernetes with support out of the box. |
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Container debugging with an integrated web terminal
Easily debug your containers in any of your environments using the built-in GitLab Web Terminal. GitLab can open a terminal session directly from your environment if your application is deployed on Kubernetes. This is a very powerful feature where you can quickly debug issues without leaving the comfort of your web browser. |
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Comprehensive pipeline graphs
Pipelines can be complex structures with many sequential and parallel jobs. To make it a little easier to see what is going on, you can view a graph of a single pipeline and its status. |
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Browsable artifacts
With GitLab CI you can upload your job artifacts in GitLab itself without the need of an external service. Because of this, artifacts are also browsable through GitLab’s web interface. |
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Latest artifacts locked to prevent deletion
The latest artifact of a successful job and pipeline on any active branch, MR, or tag is automatically locked to prevent being deleted. This makes it possible to set an aggressive expiration policy to clean up older artifacts, reduce disk space consumption, and ensure the latest artifact is always available. This default behavior is configurable at the project level and can be disabled in project settings. |
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Scheduled triggering of pipelines
You can make your pipelines run on a schedule in a cron-like environment. |
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Code Quality MR Widget
Code Quality reports are available in the merge request widget area, giving you early insights into how the change will affect the health of your code before deciding if you want to accept it. |
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Code Quality Reports
Full Code Quality reports are available on the pipeline page, showing areas of the codebase that do not meet the organization’s preferred style or standards. |
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Code Quality violation notices in MR diffs
Code Quality violations introduced in a merge request are annotated in the merge request diff view to detail how the code quality could decrease if merged. |
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Multi-project pipeline graphs
Visualize how pipelines across projects are linked together, including cross project dependencies. |
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Protected variables
You can mark a variable as “protected” to make it available only to jobs running on protected branches, therefore only authorized users can get access to it. |
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Environments and deployments
GitLab CI is capable of not only testing or building your projects, but also deploying them in your infrastructure, with the added benefit of giving you a way to track your deployments. Environments are like tags for your CI jobs, describing where code gets deployed. |
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Environments history
Environments history allows you to see what is currently being deployed on your servers, and to access a detailed view for all the past deployments. From this list you can also re-deploy the current version, or even rollback an old stable one in case something went wrong. |
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Environment-specific variables
Limit the environment scope of a variable by defining which environments it can be available for. |
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Group-level variables
Define variables at the group level and use them in any project in the group. |
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Customizable path for CI/CD configuration
You can define a custom path into your repository for your CI/CD configuration file. |
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Run CI/CD jobs on Windows
GitLab Runner supports Windows and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automatically build, test, and deploy Windows-based projects by leveraging PowerShell or batch files. |
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Run CI/CD jobs on macOS
GitLab Runner supports macOS and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automatically build, test, and deploy for macOS based projects by leveraging shell scripts and command line tools. |
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Run CI/CD jobs on Linux ARM
GitLab Runner supports Linux operating systems on ARM architectures and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automatically build, test, and deploy for Linux ARM based projects by leveraging shell scripts and command line tools. |
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Run CI/CD jobs on FreeBSD
GitLab Runner supports FreeBSD and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automatically build, test, and deploy for FreeBSD-based projects by leveraging shell scripts and command line tools. |
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Show code coverage rate for your pipelines
GitLab is able to parse job output logs and search, via a customizable regex, any information created by tools like SimpleCov to get code coverage. Data is automatically available in the UI and also as a badge you can embed in any HTML page or publish using GitLab Pages. Learn how to generate and show code coverage information in GitLab |
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Details on duration for each command execution in GitLab CI/CD
Other CI systems show execution time for each single command run in CI jobs, not just the overall time. We’re reconsidering how job output logs are managed in order to add this feature as well. |
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Auto DevOps
Auto DevOps brings DevOps best practices to your project by automatically configuring software development lifecycles by default. It automatically detects, builds, tests, deploys, and monitors applications. |
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Protected Runners
Protected Runners allow you to protect your sensitive information, for example deployment credentials, by allowing only jobs running on protected branches to access them. |
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GitLab Agent for Kubernetes
Manage the deployments and connection to your Kubernetes clusters in a secure and compliant way, driven by code. The agent supports push and pull-based deployments and operational container scanning with fine-grained access controls. |
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Fine-grained access controls for CI/CD based Kubernetes deployments
Restrict GitLab CI/CD deployment jobs using Kubernetes RBAC |
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GitOps deployment management
Run GitOps-style deployments tightly integrated into GitLab |
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Canary Deployments
GitLab Premium can monitor your Canary Deployments when
deploying your applications with Kubernetes. Canary Deployments can be configured directly through |
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Automatic Retry for Failed CI Jobs
You can specify a retry keyword in your .gitlab-ci.yml file to make GitLab CI/CD retry a job for a specific number of times before marking it as failed. |
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Pipelines security
The ability of running CI/CD pipelines on protected branches is checked against a set of security rules that defines if you’re allowed or not. It includes creating new pipelines, retrying jobs, and perform manual actions. |
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Include external files in CI/CD pipeline definition
You can include external files in your pipeline definition file, using them as templates to reuse snippets for common jobs. |
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Step folding for CI/CD logs
Collapse the job log output for each command. |
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Windows Container Executor
With this feature you are able to use Docker containers on Windows directly, in much the same was as if they were on Linux hosts. This enables more advanced kinds of pipeline orchestration and management for users of Microsoft platforms. |
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Comments in Review Apps
Shorten the feedback cycle and enable stakeholders to provide comments through a form in your review app - which is then automatically added to the related merge request. |
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