On this page
- Maintenance and Scalability Concerns
- Enterprise Readiness Concerns
- Too Many Community PlugIns Concerns
- Higher OpEx Concern
- Decision Silos Concern
- Do Nothing Concern
- Migration Time Concern
- Needed Expertise
- Functional Parity Concern
Maintenance and Scalability Concerns
| Concerns You May Have | Questions To Ask |
|---|---|
| Dedicated Resources | How do we build and maintain pipelines, manage machines, install tools etc.? |
| Specialized Groovy Expertise | I will need people with Groovy knowledge to write scripts in Jenkins. Who are my Groovy experts and have they been with our company long? |
| Plug-in Security | Use of third party plugins to access Jenkins module will create exposure? How will we test these plug-ins? How will we maintain access permissions to the Jenkins modules? |
| Upgrades are Risky | Because of a daisy chain of plug-ins and custom development, upgrades cause downtime. How much downtown time will we have from upgrades? How often do we upgrade Jenkins? What process do we follow for upgrades? |
Enterprise Readiness Concerns
| Concerns You May Have | Questions To Ask |
|---|---|
| UI using single container | Jenkins UI is run on a single container with no failover or clustering. What’s our scaling and failover set up? What kind of uptime do we target? |
| Lack of Analytics | Jenkins needs to rely on plug-ins for analytics. What are the metrics that we track? (Release velocity, Lead time from Issue to Deployment, Bugs per release?) |
| Audits and Compliance | With Jenkins, it’s not easy to track all that occurred in a release. If I’m in a regulated industries, what are our audit and compliance requirements? How often do we need to report? |
Too Many Community PlugIns Concerns
| Concerns You May Have | Questions To Ask |
|---|---|
| Too Many PlugIns | With Jenkins it can be hard to find what you need, sometimes there are 30+ plugins for a single action, how to choose? How many plugins do we use? For what purpose? |
| PlugIn Dependencies | Jenkins upgrades may depend on many plugins, some may not be compatible which could slow upgrades. How often do would we upgrade plugins and the Jenkins server? |
| PlugIn Quality | Jenkins has received complaints of poor plugin quality and lack of maintenance. Do we actively monitor our plugins and certify? What is the process to validate new versions of plugins? |
Higher OpEx Concern
- We use Jenkins Open Source. Moving to GitLab CI will increase our operational cost requiring a subscription and new expertise
| True Cost |
|---|
| Maintaining Jenkins often requires a minimum time commitment of 10% of a developer’s times (10% of their salary dedicated to Jenkins)..remember this is for CI alone |
| GitLab CI reduces build times which contributes to delivering quality code faster which leads to lower OpEx |
| GitLab’s single application offers easily consumable UI knobs and system features (We can Demo this for you!), presenting a quick and easy (i.e. affordable) learning curve. |
| Deep Jenkins technical expertise will require CloudBees which is offered through a paid subscription plan. GitLab offers a free tier and includes support within the paid tiers |
| Plugins with Jenkins could cost you in downtime due to outdated Plugins or security vulnerability introduced after upgrading. GitLab offers one end-to-end software delivery application that embeds enterprise grade security features |
Decision Silos Concern
- We allow each team to select their own DevOps tools. We don’t want to force one tool across the organization.
| Cross team collaboration | |
|---|---|
| GitLab improves synergies across the company by providing a single application that accelerates: | Sharing of ideas Providing feedback Project discussions among different groups/teams Task assignments across groups/teams |
Do Nothing Concern
- We have decided to just “Do Nothing” at this point in time
| Cost of the Comfort Zone | |
|---|---|
| OpEx Cost | Jenkins Open Source code is free, however, Jenkins implementations are not exactly free….beginning the process today of migrating from Jenkins will reduce your OpEx |
| Branding Cost | Jenkins may open your organization up to security vulnerabilities that could lead to branding vulnerabilities |
| Productivity Cost | Software delivery with Jenkins CI increased code delivery time through increased build times Maintaining Jenkins is time consuming and manual (requiring manual script development) |
Migration Time Concern
- Rebuilding my Jenkins CI Pipelines in GitLab will take too much time
| Jenkins Wrapper |
|---|
| Building an automated translator between GitLab and Jenkins would be an ideal solution, which we have extensively evaluated and continue to evaluate. |
| At the moment, we’ve determined that the best path forward in moving your CI jobs from Jenkins to GitLab is to implement a Jenkins wrapper. |
| The Wrapper will allow you to put your Jenkins CI jobs within a container and run them in GitLab. |
| The Jenkins Wrapper does not allow you to experience the full benefits of GitLab CI, however, it is a positive step forward in your migration plan/strategy |
Needed Expertise
- I’m not sure my team has the expertise needed to translate our Jenkins CI jobs to GitLab
| Jenkins Migration Services |
|---|
| GitLab has a professional service offering to assist with migrating from legacy CI systems such as Jenkins to GitLab |
| The Jenkins Migration Services offers three phases: Evaluation Education Empowerment |
Functional Parity Concern
- We have extended the functionality of our Jenkins CI tool with Plugins. I’m concerned that GitLab my not be able to support these added features
| Native Codebase and Open Source |
|---|
| To extend the native functionality of Jenkins you are required to use Plugins |
| With GitLab, we do support Plugins but you will find that our core codebase supports many features offered by 3rd party Plugins |
| Furthermore, GitLab Core is Open Source which means that anyone can contribute and add new features/functionality to the codebase which will be merged with the mainline code and automatically tested and maintained. |
