More Jenkins Value from CloudBees

Written by: Steve Harris

Jenkins User Conference in Paris

At the Jenkins User Conference in Paris last week, we announced that CloudBees is providing free access to two proprietary plugins and donating two open source plugins to the Jenkins Community. The free proprietary plugins include:

  • Folders Plugin: You can use the Folders plugin to create hierarchical folders or custom taxonomies to more easily manage large numbers of jobs. The ability to organize Jenkins jobs hierarchically has been one of the most requested features of the community. Along with the Folders Plugin, CloudBees updated a number of popular plugins to ensure they used the proper existing API for compatibility with Folders.
  • Backup Scheduling Plugin: You can use the Backup Scheduling plugin to backup job configurations, build records, system configurations or any combination thereof using CloudBees DEV@cloud.

You can access these free plugins by choosing to install the CloudBees Gateway Plugin in the Update Center. Once you install it and register for a CloudBees account, you can install the Folder and Backup plugins like any other Jenkins plugin, and you should refer to the Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees documentation.

It's probably also worth highlighting our motivations in making these plugins available for free. We're continuing to invest in open source Jenkins, along with the tremendously active community across the world. The bar for enterprisey-ness is getting higher all the time, as it should! So, by freeing these plugins now, we are continuing to raise the bar on ourselves and our Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees offering. Stay tuned as we bring Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees to even higher levels.

The new open source plugins include:

  • File Leak Detector Plugin : If you've ever encountered the dreaded "too many open files” problem running Jenkins, you now have a way to diagnose and fix the root cause. This plugin watches file descriptor open/close activities of a JVM and allows you to see the list of what's currently opened, as well as the Java call stack that opened the file.
  • Credentials Plugin : This plugin allows you to store credentials in Jenkins. It provides a standardized API for other plugins to store and retrieve different types of credentials. We feel this plugin is an important building block as Jenkins is deployed in more security-conscious environments, and of course we use it ourselves!

Collectively, these plugins deliver even more power into the hands of every Jenkins user. You can leverage the folder capabilities to organize jobs and the power of the cloud to capture the state of your Jenkins deployments. The plugins also make it even simpler for you to use the CloudBees platform to build and stage application code for real-time testing, delivering higher quality software more quickly. We've even added a plugin we call the Wasted Minutes plugin, to tell you how much time you could have saved if you had more executors available -- and of course, those are always teed up and waiting you to use on CloudBees.

We're sure you'll find these new plugins to be useful.

Let's all continue to push Jenkins and find ways to make it even better!

Steven G. Harris
Senior VP of Products
CloudBees

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