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Following right on the heels of our US-East Jenkins User Conference in Boston, we have JUC Europe in Berlin on June 25. Like the East Coast conference, the Berlin one is almost full, so sign up while you can. Our venue in Berlin is KOSMOS, a building with a fascinating history. The building was inaugurated as a cinema in 1961. With 1001 seats, it was the largest, most modern and most popular film theatre in the former GDR and has since been extensively modernized in line with the requirements of historically listed buildings. We have an excellent line-up of speakers filling up two conference tracks. Once again, we have some fabulous sponsors to thank. Without them, there would be no JUC. This year we’ve introduced a new Community sponsorship level, which allows non-corporate groups like JUGSs to help support the conference as well. (Drop a note to juc-oc-ext AT cloudbees DOT com if your group is interested). We are very grateful to all of our sponsors – thank you! Hopefully see everyone at JUC. PS – if you are coming to Berlin for JUC, check out the CD Summit on June 24 at the same venue. There’s also one on June 19 in NYC. The summit will focus on how continuous integration with Jenkins streamlines processes and automates testing and deployment, providing the foundation you need for continuous delivery.

Jenkins won SDTimes 100, 2014 + image:https://www.sdtimes.com/images/sdt100/2014SDT100_logo_120x123.gif[image] + + + + For the 5th year in a row, Jenkins project won https://sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=71295&page=4[SDTimes 100, 2014] this year under DevOps and SCM categories, along with other open-source projects like Chef, Docker, Git, LLVM, and Puppet. + + + I'd like to take this opportunity to once again thank the community for keeing us going strong. There's https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jenkinsci-dev/qrG7bAnZSHQ[a lot] of https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jenkinsci-dev/zDaX4yiWLLw[interesting] efforts https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jenkinsci-dev/l5vrC8BqVJQ[going on] in https://github.com/jenkinsci/acceptance-test-harness[the project], as always, so expect more stuff to come out from us in the coming days! +

+ Over the past 30 days or so, https://github.com/jenkinsci/acceptance-test-harness/[the acceptance test project] has made a great progress. + + + This project consists of a reusable harness that can be used by plugin developers and users to write functional test cases. These tests can be run against Jenkins instances that are deployed in https://github.com/jenkinsci/acceptance-test-harness/blob/master/docs/CONTROLLER.md[all sorts of different ways], and can interact with https://github.com/jenkinsci/acceptance-test-harness/blob/master/docs/FIXTURES.md[complex real fixtures]. These tests can be also run with specific version of Jenkins core and a combination of plugins. + + + The number of tests have https://jenkins.ci.cloudbees.com/job/core/job/acceptance-test-harness/[steadily increased to above 300]. Several of those are by https://github.com/eidottermihi[Michael Prankl], where he tests https://github.com/jenkinsci/acceptance-test-harness/blob/master/src/test/java/plugins/LdapPluginTest.java[the LDAP plugin with the real OpenLDAP server instance] that runs inside Docker — a kind of test that just wasn't possible before can be now easily written. + + + https://github.com/jenkinsci/acceptance-test-harness/graphs/contributors[More than a dozen people] have contributed. https://github.com/jenkinsci/acceptance-test-harness/commits/master[A dozen changes are going in every single day], and more are coming — for example, Stephen is working on modularizing this harness and adding new pieces that allow people to do scalability and load testing. That'll be a part of this effort soon. + + + If you are one of the large scale users who are interested in automating some of your Jenkins acceptance testing, please https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/jenkinsci-dev[drop us a note at the DEV list] so that we can work together. You can also watch the recording of our last https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Office+Hours[office hours] where I demoed how you'd develop a test on top of this: + + + + + I think we all agree that this is an important effort/ Looking forward to joining the efforts with more people in the community! + +

+ As the Jenkins project grows, https://jenkins-ci.org/content/come-join-infra-team[the need for our infrastructure has been growing]. https://ci.jenkins.io/[Our Jenkins-on-Jenkins] needs more build agents, we need more servers to run our infrastructure services. + + + And it was https://jenkins-ci.org/content/big-thanks-rackspace[once again] Rackspace who stepped up to the plate; they have kindly donated us more https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/[cloud servers]. I also use Rackspace for one of my personal servers, and when I went back to their admin console this time, I noticed that they've added https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/[a lot more services] to their offering. + + + image:https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://agentdero.cachefly.net/continuousblog/rackspace.jpg[image,width=200,height=200] + + + + I am setting up these boxes as I write this. A huge thank you for Rackspace for their support of this project. And if you are interested in using Rackspace cloud servers as elastic build agents, https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/JClouds+Plugin[jclouds plugin] is your friend.

+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Allen_(author)[ + image:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/49/The_Hidden_Agenda_3D.png/181px-The_Hidden_Agenda_3D.png[image] + ] + + + Agenda is posted for Jenkins User Conference https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/juc-2014/boston[Boston] and https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/juc-2014/berlin[Berlin]. + + + For Boston, my favorite would be the https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/juc-2014/boston/sessions#JesseGlick[workflow in Jenkins] talk that will cover the new workflow job type Jesse and I are working on. As of this writing it is still very much a work in progress, but that talk is our way of putting a stake on the ground that we WILL have something we can talk about by then. There's also some talks that describes how they've put together pieces (including Jenkins) to create a broad automation, such as https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/juc-2014/boston/sessions#HoiTsang[Distributed Scrum Development with Jenkins, Vagrant, Fabric and Selenium] and https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/juc-2014/boston/sessions#JimCrossley[Moving Existing Enterprise Systems to Continuous Integration and Deployment with Jenkins]. + + + For Berlin, it turns out that we have steller line up of the speakers far beyond my expectation. You have a number of key community contributors/developers like https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/juc-2014/berlin/speakers#ChristopherOrr[Christopher Orr] talking about https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/juc-2014/berlin/sessions#ChristopherOrr[how he does mobile build/test/deploy], or https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/juc-2014/berlin/speakers#VincentLatombe[Vincent] talking about https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Literate+Plugin[literate plugin]. I'm also looking forward to the https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/juc-2014/berlin/sessions#JulienPivotto[Puppetizing Jenkins Pipelines] from Julien Pivotto, which (if I understand correctly) is about deploying Jenkins and its jobs through Puppet — That is something I notice many people are very interested in nowadays. + + + All of them are looking forward to meeting you and hearing your thoughts and feedbacks, and I'm sure this is going to be a great learning/networking oppotunities. + + + https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jenkins-user-conference-boston-ma-june-18-2014-tickets-10558652213[Registration for Boston is here], and https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jenkins-user-conference-berlin-germany-june-25-2014-tickets-10557974185[registration for Berlin is here]. Seats are starting to fill up now, so don't procrastinate too much!

+ https://puppetlabs.com/[image:https://i.stack.imgur.com/RZN4l.jpg[image,width=100]] + + We are looking for volunteers to join the small infra team here at the Jenkins project. We are the butlers of the butler that get Mr.Jenkins going. + + + We've been https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins-infra[managing our servers through puppet], and have been slowly folding pieces one at a time to puppet, but there's still a lot of snowflake services that need proper operationalization. + + + So to fix them up, https://puppetlabs.com/[PuppetLabs] folks generously agreed to help us get going with a deployment of Puppet Enterprise. Tyler has managed to arrange a "rapid deployment" engagement. To kick start the effort, an instructor would come for one week (April 28th-May 2nd) to bring us up to speed on modern Puppet. we'll then spend some time on our own to puppt-ize more, and deploy Puppet Enterprise. + + + The end goal is to ensure sustainability of our infrastructure, in case of unexpected server loss. + + + As we are about to get this effort going, we think this is a good time to solicit a few more volunteers. We are looking for someone who could join this two week engagement in San Francisco, and keep their involvement beyond that. This is a part time volunteer work, and you'd get some visibility and exposure to the inner guts of open-source projects, not to mention the satisfaction of getting thanked for your work. + + + If you are interested, please https://jenkins-ci.org/content/mailing-lists[drop us a note at the infra list]. +

+ image:https://clsdf.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/tumblr_lkzltkxTmF1qersu1.gif[image] + + + One of the new efforts in Jenkins this year is https://github.com/jenkinsci/acceptance-test-harness[the acceptance test harness] for Jenkins. + + + We will be doing the Jenkins office hours next week to go over this and sync up and coordinate between people in the community that are trying to work on this. + + + It'll be *April 23rd 11am PT* (https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Jenkins+Governance+Meeting&iso=20140423T11&p1=224&ah=1&sort=1[see what this time is in your time zone]) on Google Hangout at https://jenkins-ci.org/hangout. If you are intereste in hacking Jenkins or if you are a large user of Jenkins who have acceptance tests, we are looking forward to seeing you there. + + + For those of you who haven't looked, this test harness allows you to write blackbox tests of Jenkins and its plugins. It was originally used to test LTS releases, but over the time, it acquired a number of features, such as ...: + + Docker support for launching complex fixtures to test Jenkins with. Pluggability to launch Jenkins under test (JUT) in many different environments Pluggability to provision Jenkins and agents from EC2 to test large deployments Choice of cucumber or JUnit to write test scripts + + + We are working on porting over existing test cases, but we'd like to work with users to move their acceptance tests on top of this same harness. The idea is to pool those test cases in the community so that we can test Jenkins and its plugins as we develop them. For this to work, we want tests to have lots of metadata (such as what plugins it touches), and for the harness to have sufficient modularity that different people can run the same scenario against different deployments, including existing instance. +

+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nio[ + image:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/02/Nikko_Toshogu_Nio_M3043.jpg/160px-Nikko_Toshogu_Nio_M3043.jpg[image] + ] + Nio + + + + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_I/O[NIO]-based https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Distributed+builds#Distributedbuilds-LaunchslaveagentviaJavaWebStart[Java Web Start (JNLP) agent handling] is coming to 1.560. This will help you run a large number of JNLP agents more efficiently. A connected JNLP agent used to occupy one thread on the controller, but now it occupies none. Combined with the earlier change that eliminated threads from idle executors, now you can connect thousands of agents. + + + All you have to do is to use the latest `+agent.jar+` from Jenkins 1.560. No other changes are necessary on users' part. + + + A bulk of this is implemented in https://github.com/jenkinsci/remoting[remoting 2.38], and a good part of it was implemented about a year ago on the airplane on the way to Europe. + + + We plan to make CLI connections take advantages of this too, which helps those who use that a lot. That's not in 1.560, but hopefully it'll be in the near future. This change also paves a way for multi-participant bus-topology communication, which I think would be an useful building block for https://github.com/jenkinsci/master-to-master-api-plugin/[the work-in-progress controller-to-controller API].