Integrated Pipelines with Jenkins CI

This is part of a series of blog posts in which various CloudBees technical experts have summarized presentations from the Jenkins User Conferences (JUC). This post is written by Félix Belzunce, solutions architect, CloudBees about a presentation given by Mark Rendell, Accenture, at JUC Berlin .

Integrated Pipelines is a pattern that Mark Rendell uses at Accenture to reduce the complexity of integrating different packages when they come from different source control repositories.

The image below, which was one of the slides that Mark presented, represents the problem of building several packages, which will need to be integrated at some point. The build version we need to use, how to manage the control flow and what exactly we need to release are all the main pain points when you are working on such an integration.

Mark proposes a solution where you will not only create a CI pipeline, but also an Integration pipeline to be able to fix the problem. In order to stop displaying all the jobs downstream inside the pipeline, Mark uses a Groovy script. For deploying the right version of the application, several approaches could be used: Maven, Nexus or even a simple plain text file.

The pattern can scale up, but using this same concept for micro services could be indeed a big challenge as the number or pipelines significantly scales up. As Mark pointed out, it cannot only be applied to micro services or applications, as this concept on Jenkins could be also used when you do Continuous Delivery to manage your infrastructure.

You might use similar jobs configurations along your different pipelines. The CloudBees templates plugin will be useful to templatize your different jobs, allowing you to save time and making the process more reliable. It also allows you to do a one time modification in the template which will automatically be pushed to all the jobs without going individually from one job to another.

View the slides and video from this talk here .

Félix Belzunce
Solutions Architect
CloudBees

Félix Belzunce is a solutions architect for CloudBees based in Europe. He focuses on continuous delivery. Read more about him on his Meet the Bees blog post and follow him on Twitter.