Jenkins Community Achieves Record Growth Driven by Major Innovation

Jenkins remains the most popular open source automation server, globally, due to the ongoing innovation within the vibrant Jenkins community

NICE, France--()--DevOps World | Jenkins World – The Jenkins project, comprised of the community of practitioners using Jenkins®, today announced that the Jenkins project is driving record growth amidst a period of strong innovation within the community. Jenkins X, Cloud Native Jenkins, Configuration as Code, Jenkins Pipeline and Jenkins Evergreen were identified as the five most significant projects - referred to as “superpowers” - driving this growth and innovation according to Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Jenkins creator and chief technology officer at CloudBees®, in his opening keynote at DevOps World | Jenkins World 2018.

Jenkins is the world's leading open source automation server used by companies large and small around the globe to implement continuous integration and continuous delivery. During the period from September 30, 2017 to September 30, 20181:

  • Community growth was 24.4 percent in the period September 30, 2017 to September 30, 2018
    The community experienced 24.4 percent growth, reaching 192,623 active installations in the period from September 30, 2017 - September 30, 2018. However, these are only the installations that permit usage information to be transmitted to the Jenkins project, so this number is not representative of the total Jenkins user population, which is much greater.
  • Approximately 15 million Jenkins developers
    A recent Datanyze analysis showed that 68 percent of continuous integration is being done on Jenkins. With an estimated 23 million developers, globally, according to Evans Data in its Global Developer Population and Demographics Study, approximately 15 million developers are using Jenkins.
  • Growth in Jenkins Pipeline jobs of 309 percent
    Finally, the combined number of defined Jenkins Pipeline and other jobs increased during this same period from 10,509,706 million to 20,664,054 million, with Jenkins Pipeline jobs demonstrating growth of 309 percent from last year. The growth in Jenkins Pipeline jobs demonstrates that organizations are accelerating their investment in modern software pipeline automation practices with Jenkins.

"I fell in love with Jenkins when it was a small project, well before it adopted the name. I was drawn to it not only because it was a great CI/CD solution, but more importantly because of the vibrant community that had already grown up around it,” said Eric Smalling, solution architect and long-time Jenkins user. “Over a decade later, as I consult at companies of all sizes, Jenkins is still the go-to solution because the community continues to not only evolve the product but because contributors continue to care deeply about users succeeding in their CI/CD journey."

The community that has sprung up around Jenkins is currently engaged in the greatest period of innovation in the history of the project. Innovations are occurring across many areas, all aimed at increasing the ease of automating software delivery pipelines, accelerating the velocity from development to production and enabling users to fully leverage the newest technologies and processes, such as Kubernetes and other cloud native tools.

The five “superpower” projects identified by Kawaguchi in his keynote are:

1. Jenkins X: Jenkins X is a Kubernetes-native CI/CD platform, allowing developers to build their own cloud native applications. To provide a smooth user experience on Kubernetes clusters, Jenkins X utilizes the following: Kubernetes/Prow for scalable web-hooks; Knative build and serverless Jenkins for horizontally scalable builds; Helm for packing of applications; Istio for traffic shaping to preview environments and Skaffold for building of container images.

Users can easily accelerate application deployments to Kubernetes, in all major cloud environments - AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat OpenShift, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, VMware Cloud - which is a key benefit for businesses adopting a multi-cloud strategy. Additionally, Jenkins X enables users to adopt practices such as GitOps and serverless computing.

2. Cloud Native Jenkins: DevOps teams can now fully leverage cloud native capabilities. With cloud native support, users can add a few more orders of magnitude to the scalability of their Jenkins implementation, with cost proportional to usage, data and compute power. These enhancements support use cases for Jenkins users who want to tap the advantages of the cloud and/or need to run Jenkins at scale. A cloud native SIG has been formed to work on this project, with heavy involvement from Microsoft and Google.

3. Jenkins Configuration as Code: A key benefit with this project is a consistent, repeatable Jenkins environment. Users define the exact configuration of their Jenkins environment through capabilities such as version control, pull request review, rolling deployments, the ability to see configuration settings and to track the set of plugins in use and their versions.

4. Jenkins Pipeline: Jenkins Pipeline is a suite of plugins which supports implementing and integrating software delivery pipelines into Jenkins. In an effort to further enhance Jenkins Pipeline and make it easier for customers to create and deploy software pipelines, Blue Ocean will become a foundational part of Jenkins Pipeline and cease to be a separate product.

5. Jenkins Evergreen: Jenkins Evergreen transforms Jenkins to a connected, self-upgrading appliance. It is a radical simplification of Jenkins, delivering CI as a Service, and auto-deploying updates to a Jenkins installation. This project aims to help users get productive more quickly, as it allows new users to install and have Jenkins up and running in under five minutes and five clicks.

“The Jenkins project has been an amazing success for more than ten years,” said Kawaguchi. “What started as a hobby project of mine has become a huge community, which today boasts thousands of contributors and millions of users. When I think about what has enabled this amazing success, I can think of several factors: extensibility, versatility and our community. The community is currently engaged in the most active period of major innovation in the history of Jenkins, which is creating a high level of excitement among users.”

Additional Resources

1 The Jenkins community tracks statistics from active Jenkins installations that transmit usage information back to the project. The numbers do not represent a majority of Jenkins installations, only those who choose to report. Therefore, the numbers are conservative, but do represent Jenkins implementations actively being used.

About Jenkins and the Jenkins Community
Jenkins is the leading open source automation server supported by a large and growing community of developers, testers, designers and other people interested in continuous integration, continuous delivery and modern software delivery practices. Built on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), it provides more than 1,400 plugins that extend Jenkins to automate with practically any technology software delivery teams use.

The Jenkins community advocates the use of Jenkins to the global development community, serving as a central source for tutorials, forums and other helpful resources for Jenkins users of all experience levels. By recognizing the numerous contributors to the Jenkins project, the Jenkins project creates and fosters a community-powered infrastructure for maintaining and further developing Jenkins. You can follow the Jenkins community on Twitter (@JenkinsCI).

The registered trademark Jenkins® is used pursuant to a sublicense from the Jenkins project and Software in the Public Interest, Inc. Read more at: www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/about.

CloudBees is a registered trademark and CloudBees Core is a trademark of CloudBees, Inc. Other product or brand names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

Contacts

AxiCom
Savannah O’Hare or Francesco Tius, +44 (0) 20 7559 5614
CloudBeesUK@axicom.com

Contacts

AxiCom
Savannah O’Hare or Francesco Tius, +44 (0) 20 7559 5614
CloudBeesUK@axicom.com