CloudBees Core enables developer teams to deliver software quickly and efficiently by automating continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD). It optimizes the delivery of high quality applications while ensuring the software delivered is secure and compliant. CloudBees Core can benefit from running on Kubernetes which enables administrators to optimize their cloud infrastructure usage by allowing them to quickly spin up and use new build agents to meet increased demand.
Since its release in 2015,Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) has delivered Kubernetes services which allows users to make security, reliability, and ease-of-use a priority. GKE abstracts the complexity of managing Kubernetes which makes the lives of administrators easier.
The introduction of Kubernetes v1.14 in April 2019 included support for Microsoft Windows nodes which means that organizations can now set up pools of Windows servers and create a set of containers in a pod that share storage volumes and a network interface. The Windows nodes are managed by a Linux-based Kubernetes controller node.
At CloudBees, we have seen significant growth of GKE within our customers and as a result, have extended the functionality of CloudBees Core to include support for Windows build agent containers. This means that organizations wanting to use Windows-based development tools in their CloudBees Core pipelines to create and test applications can now take advantage of Windows containers managed by Kubernetes which gives them increased flexibility, resilience, and scalability.
If organizations see an increase in demand for Windows-based build agents, new instances can be dynamically provisioned via Kubernetes which ensures that the wait time for developers wanting to build and test applications does not increase significantly. This auto-scaling functionality means that organizations can ensure a high quality of service to their developers while optimizing their cloud-usage due to only using agents in the cloud when required.
To take advantage of support for build agents running on Microsoft Windows containers on GKE with Kubernetes versions 1.14, you need to be running CloudBees Core version 2.190.3.2 or later.