Webinar Q&A: What's New in CloudBees v15.11

On December 8th, 2015 CloudBees presented a webinar about the new release of the CloudBees Jenkins Platform. Our presenters were Ravi Gopalakrishnan and Tracy Kennedy.

You can view the recording here .

Below are the answers to the questions asked during the sessions.

Q: We extensively use the Multi Job plugin, is there a similar plugin that comes with CloudBees Jenkins Platform - Enterprise Edition?

A: Functionally, the workflow plugin replaces the multijob plugin while the Workflow Stage View plugin allows a user to visualize these stages.

Q: Can CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center manage an active-standby controller architecture? How does it keep the configuration in sync?

A: Currently the CloudBees Jenkins Platform supports active-passive high availability through its High Availability plugin. This plugin allows a Jenkins controller to failover to a standby node by allowing the two controllers to communicate via healthcheck URLs. If the primary node returns as unhealthy, the standby node will load all configurations (system, job, etc.) from a shared file system with the primary node. The details of this architecture and how the failover occurs are flexible and are dependent on what components you can/want to use.

Here is a sample architecture where a highly-available CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center controller is managing both a non-HA controller and a highly available Jenkins controller: http://documentation.cloudbees.com/docs/cjoc-user-guide/_sample_architecture.html?query=ha+architecture

Q: We like the jenkinsfile, but some teams are in Perforce, not GitHub. Are there any plans to support jenkinsfile for other repos beside GitHub, Bitbucket and Mercurial?

A: The following SCMs currently support Jenkinsfiles to create pipelines: SVN, Git and Mercurial. This means that things like TFS Git and Perforce Git do support multi-branching/Jenkinsfiles, and extension points are available if developers want to write implementations for other SCMs or for multi-branch support.

Jenkinsfile and multi-branch support are also already available for those using Git with Microsoft Visual Studio Online, since CloudBees is a Microsoft partner. You can read more about the partnership here .

Q: How do you identify SVN merge conflicts issues through Jenkins when developers are committing changes to multiple branches and trunk after PROD release?

A: The answer to this depends on how you are currently or are planning to run your pipelines in Jenkins. There are several plugins to that do this, as well as third-party solutions. Subversion itself also offers the option to merge conflicts and to set a flag to accept all changes, and these calls can be made within a workflow or a traditional Jenkins job.

Q: Is there a trial version of the CloudBees Jenkins Platform - Enterprise Edition? Could you please send me the download link to the trial version?

A: Trials of the CloudBees Jenkins Platform are available, but please contact us here to request a download.

Q: Editing a Jenkinsfile stored in a Git repo, outside any Jenkins editors, can be a challenge. Its hard to know what steps are available, what the step syntax is, etc. Any plans for an external IDE?

A: Yes, we are planning to build syntax support for the most popular IDEs such as Eclipse and IntelliJ.