Watch this before learning Jenkins

Summary

In this video, Abhishek delves into the relevance of Jenkins in 2025, weighing its pros and cons in the cloud-native era. He shares his experience with Jenkins, highlighting its open-source nature, extensive plugin ecosystem, and flexibility, alongside challenges like plugin maintenance and scalability issues in large organizations. Despite its drawbacks, Jenkins remains widely used, especially in enterprises with long-established CI/CD workflows. Abhishek suggests that while Jenkins is still useful for interview preparation, organizations may want to explore modern alternatives like GitHub Actions or Argo Workflows for cloud-native solutions.

Takeaways

• 😀 Jenkins has been around since 2004, originally as Hudson, and became Jenkins in 2011 after a fork due to licensing issues.
• 😀 Jenkins is open-source, free to use, and has a large plugin ecosystem, which makes it a popular choice for many companies.
• 😀 Jenkins can be highly customized, with users able to install and configure plugins according to their needs.
• 😀 One of Jenkins' main advantages is its community support, making it easy to find solutions to problems on forums like Stack Overflow or Reddit.
• 😀 Jenkins is VCS (Version Control System) independent, meaning it can integrate with multiple version control systems like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
• 😀 Self-hosting Jenkins is beneficial for organizations that need to keep their source code and secrets secure, such as in the banking or finance sector.
• 😀 Maintenance overhead is a major downside of Jenkins, especially in large organizations where scaling, upgrading, and ensuring high availability becomes complex.
• 😀 The plugin system in Jenkins, while extensive, also poses a risk due to deprecated or poorly maintained plugins that may affect functionality.
• 😀 Jenkins was not designed for cloud-native environments and may struggle to scale efficiently with large numbers of microservices or agents.
• 😀 Modern CI/CD alternatives like GitHub Actions, GitLab Pipelines, Argo Workflows, and Jenkins X provide cloud-native solutions and may be better suited for scalability and ease of use in 2025.
• 😀 Despite its cons, Jenkins remains relevant for large organizations, especially where migrating to alternatives would require significant time and resources. It's still valuable for DevOps professionals to learn Jenkins, particularly for jobs in MNCs.

Q & A

What is the main focus of the video?

The video focuses on evaluating the relevance of Jenkins in 2025, considering whether it is still a useful CI/CD tool or if it is outdated in the cloud-native era.

What was Jenkins originally known as?

Jenkins was originally known as Hudson before it was renamed in 2011 due to licensing issues after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.

Why do many companies still use Jenkins after 20 years?

Jenkins has a strong, open-source foundation, a rich plugin ecosystem, flexibility in customization, and a large community for support, making it an attractive option for many companies, especially in industries where self-hosting is preferred.

What are the key advantages of Jenkins?

Key advantages of Jenkins include its open-source nature, extensive plugin support, ability to integrate with multiple version control systems, self-hosting capabilities, high customization options, and a large, active community offering support.

What are some of the downsides of using Jenkins?

Some downsides of Jenkins include the maintenance of outdated or unsupported plugins, high maintenance overhead (especially at scale), lack of cloud-native features, difficulties with scaling, and the need for high availability setups in large environments.

Why is self-hosting Jenkins important for certain industries?

Self-hosting Jenkins is crucial for industries like banking and finance where data security, control over source code, and keeping sensitive information like API tokens private are essential.

How does Jenkins compare to newer CI/CD tools like GitHub Actions and GitLab Pipelines?

Jenkins is not cloud-native and can face scaling challenges, while GitHub Actions and GitLab Pipelines are more integrated with modern cloud environments, offering smoother scalability and less maintenance, making them better suited for cloud-native applications.

What is Jenkins X and how does it address Jenkins' limitations?

Jenkins X is a cloud-native alternative to Jenkins, designed to better support modern cloud environments and microservices architectures. It is actively developed by the community and backed by the CD Foundation.

Why is migrating from Jenkins to other CI/CD tools challenging?

Migrating from Jenkins to other CI/CD tools can be difficult due to the large number of Jenkins jobs and Groovy scripts in use, requiring a significant amount of time and effort (sometimes months or even a year) to transition to a new platform.

What should a DevOps or cloud aspirant focus on regarding Jenkins for interviews?

DevOps or cloud aspirants should focus on understanding Jenkins pipelines, both declarative and imperative, and learn how to build simple CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins as it remains relevant in many large organizations for their CI/CD workflows.