I do not think it is an exaggeration to say: 2016 was the best year yet for the
Jenkins project. Since the first commit in 2006, the project has reached a
number of significant milestones in its ten years but we have never experienced
the breadth of major milestones in such a short amount of time. From
Jenkins 2
and
Blue Ocean
to the
Google Summer of Code
and
Jenkins World,
I wanted to take a moment and celebrate the myriad of accomplishments which
couldn’t have happened without the help from everybody who participates in the
Jenkins project. The 1,300+ contributors to the
jenkinsci GitHub organization,
the 4,000+ members of the
developers mailing list,
the 8,000+ members of the
users mailing list,
and countless others who have reported issues, submitted pull requests, and
presented at meetups and conferences.
Jenkins 2
Through the course of 2016, the Jenkins project published 16
LTS releases
and 54
Weekly releases.
Of those 70 releases, the most notable may have been the
Jenkins 2.0 release
which was published in April.
Jenkins 2 made Pipeline as Code front-and-center in the user experience,
introduced a new "Getting Started" experience, and included a number of other
small UI improvements, all while maintaining backwards compatibility with
existing Jenkins environments.
Since April, we have released a number of LTS
releases using Jenkins 2 as a baseline, meaning the Jenkins project no longer
maintains any 1.x release lines.
The
Pipeline
efforts have continuted to gain steam since April, covered on this blog with a
number of
posts tagged "pipeline". Closing out 2016 with the
announcement of the beta for
Declarative Pipeline syntax
which is expected in early 2017.
Blue Ocean
Hot on the heels of Jenkins 2 announcement"Blue Ocean, a new user experience for Jenkins",
was
open sourced in May.
Blue Ocean is a new project that rethinks the user experience of Jenkins.
Designed from the ground up for Jenkins Pipeline and compatible with Freestyle
jobs. The goal for the project is to reduce clutter and increase clarity for
every member of a team using Jenkins.
The Blue Ocean beta can be installed from the Update Center and can be run in
production Jenkins environments alongside the existing UI. It adds the new user experience under
/blue in the environment but does not disturb the existing UI.
Blue Ocean is expected to reach "1.0" in the first half of 2017.
Azure
Also in May of 2016, the Jenkins project announced an exciting
Partnership with Microsoft
to run our project infrastructure on
Azure. While the migration of Jenkins project
infrastructure into Azure is still on-going, there have been some notable
milestones reached already:
End-to-end TLS encrypted delivery for Debian/openSUSE/Red Hat repositories which are
configured to use https://pkg.jenkins.io by the end-user.
Major capacity improvements to
ci.jenkins.io
providing on-demand Ubuntu and Windows build/test infrastructure.
A full continuous delivery Pipeline for all Azure-based infrastructure using
Terraform from Jenkins.
The migration to Azure is expected to complete in 2017.
Google Summer of Code
For the first time in the history of the project, Jenkins was accepted into
Google Summer of Code
2016. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an annual, international, program
which encourages college-aged students to participate with open source projects
during the summer break between classes. Students accepted into the program
receive a stipend, paid by Google, to work well-defined projects to improve or
enhance the Jenkins project.
In exchange, numerous Jenkins community members volunteered as "mentors" for
students to help integrate them into the open source community and succeed in
completing their summer projects.
A lot was learned during the summer which we look forward to applying to Google
Summer of Code 2017
Jenkins World
In September, over one thousand people attended
Jenkins World,
in Santa Clara, California.
Following the event,
Liam
posted a series of blog posts which highlight some of the fantastic content
shared by Jenkins users and contributors from around the world, such as:
The demos from the "Experts"
Sessions on Scaling Jenkins
Using Jenkins Pipeline
The Contributor Summit
Jenkins World was the first global event of its kind for Jenkins, it brought users
and contributors together to exchange ideas on the current state of the
project, celebrate accomplishments of the past year, and look ahead at all the
exiting enhancements coming down the pipe(line).
It was such a smashing success that
Jenkins World 2017
is already scheduled for August 30-31st in San Francisco, California.
JAM
Finally, 2016 saw tremendous growth in the number of
Jenkins Area Meetups
(JAMs) hosted around the world. JAMs are local meetups intended to bring
Jenkins users and contributors together for socializing and learning. JAMs are
organized by local Jenkins community members who have a passion for sharing new
Jenkins concepts, patterns and tools.
Driven by current Jenkins Events Officer,
Alyssa Tong,
and the dozens of passionate organizers, JAMs have become a great way to meet
other Jenkins users near you.
While we don’t yet have JAMs on each of the seven continents, you can always join the
Jenkins Online Meetup.
Though we’re hoping more groups will be founded near you in 2017!
I am personally grateful for the variety and volume of contributions made by
thousands of people to the Jenkins project this year. I believe I can speak for
project founder,
Kohsuke Kawaguchi,
in stating that the Jenkins community has grown beyond our anything we could
have imagined five years ago, let alone ten!
There are number of ways to
participate
in the Jenkins project, so if you didn’t have an opportunity to join in during
2016, we hope to see you next year!