New Blue Ocean user experience is the next wave in making continuous delivery visual and intuitive to the entire software delivery team
JENKINS WORLD – SANTA CLARA, CA. – September 14, 2016 - The Jenkins project , comprised of a community of practitioners using open source Jenkins, announced that the beta of Blue Ocean, a powerful new experience for Jenkins users, is here.
Jenkins is widely considered the most popular automation server in use today. As of August 31, the global community of Jenkins users had 9.5 million defined Jenkins jobs automating tasks across 132,210 self-reported Jenkins installations. Since its release in April, the Jenkins community has been rapidly adopting Jenkins 2. Today, about 40 percent of all known Jenkins installations, or more than 51,000 installations, are using Jenkins 2. Jenkins 2 is a big leap forward in making the start-up experience smooth and fast, continuous delivery (CD) easier to adopt and pipelines more intuitive to automate.
Building on the momentum of Jenkins 2, the Blue Ocean project was born. An improved, modern UX has been a consistent request of Jenkins users throughout the last three community surveys1 . With Blue Ocean, the UX is being built from the ground up to take full advantage of the power Jenkins is known for, while providing the ease of use which supports modern continuous delivery.
“Jenkins is tremendously powerful for automating complex CD pipelines, but the user experience doesn’t fully accommodate the growing user base - which now includes casual users, as well as the more traditional advanced users,” said James Dumay, Blue Ocean community lead and senior product manager at CloudBees. “With Blue Ocean, you get a simplified view of the CD pipeline and see only the most relevant and commonly accessed information. Therefore, you are not overwhelmed with an excess of nonessential data. We’re extremely focused on presenting information in a very visual and intuitive way to provide clarity at-a-glance for every member of a DevOps team.”
CD pipelines are inherently complex, making it difficult for team members – from developers to IT operations to management – to get a common understanding of the progression of software through the pipeline. Blue Ocean addresses this by providing intuitive visualizations that can be easily understood by all members of the team. Failure analysis is a good example, as it is difficult and time consuming to identify, trace, investigate and resolve a problem. Using Blue Ocean, team members gain a graphical overview of the pipeline to quickly identify issues and can then drill down within the same interface to find the source of the problem.
“I am pleased to see the community act on the long-standing requests to modernize the Jenkins UX. I’ve been using the Blue Ocean alpha and beta releases and providing input to help drive the project,” said Alex Ellis (@alexellisuk ), principal developer and Docker Captain. “The Jenkins community is working hard to build the best user experience and I believe they are on the right path by prioritizing Pipeline as code and now announcing Blue Ocean. The first time I saw Blue Ocean, I could not recognize the functional business tool that I’d been staring at for years. Automation constrains the speed at which continuous delivery can function, but Pipeline as code along with the new UX accelerates teams in a visual and intuitive way.”
Written as an extensible framework, Blue Ocean can be extended by anyone to make the powerful features of Jenkins simple to use. Features available at beta include:
Sophisticated visualizations of CD pipelines, allowing for fast and intuitive comprehension of software pipeline status.
A Pipeline editor that makes automating CD pipelines approachable by guiding the user through an intuitive and visual process to create a pipeline.
Personalization of the Jenkins UI to suit the role-based needs of each member of the DevOps team.
Pinpoint precision when intervention is needed and/or issues arise. The Blue Ocean UI shows where in the pipeline attention is needed, facilitating exception handling and increasing productivity.
Native integration for branch and pull requests enables maximum developer productivity when collaborating on code with others in GitHub.
"The phenomenal uptake of Jenkins 2 and the Pipeline functionality indicates to me that more teams are practicing modern continuous delivery. Blue Ocean continues the evolution of Jenkins to an easy-to-use, yet powerful automation platform accessed through a modern UI,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Jenkins founder and CTO at CloudBees. “Extensibility is the core of Jenkins’ DNA, which we are committed to retain as Jenkins evolves. Projects like Blue Ocean exemplify this philosophy of extensibility, while continuing to enhance the power and usability of Jenkins."
The Blue Ocean project launch was rapidly embraced by the Jenkins user community and the first official beta, released today at Jenkins World, is a major milestone for the project.
Blue Ocean’s visualization of a software delivery pipeline
Additional Resources
Watch the video about Blue Ocean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dITffteCD4Jenkins World Session:
Blue Ocean: A New User Experience for Jenkins, by James Dumay
Wednesday, September 14, 2:00pm PDT
https://cloudbees.com/blue-ocean-new-user-experience-jenkinsRead the blog about Blue Ocean:
https://jenkins.io/blog/2016/05/26/introducing-blue-ocean/Try Blue Ocean:
https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/Download Jenkins 2:
http://jenkins.io
1 The State of Jenkins, 2015 Jenkins community survey: https://cloudbees.com/sites/default/files/2015-jenkins-community-survey-infographic.pdf
About Jenkins and the Jenkins Community
Jenkins is the leading open source automation server supported by a large and growing community of developers, testers, designers and other people interested in continuous integration, continuous delivery and other modern software delivery practices. Built on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), it provides more than 1,200 plugins that extend Jenkins to automate with practically any technology software delivery teams use.
The Jenkins community advocates the use of Jenkins to the global development community, serving as a central source for tutorials, forums and other helpful resources for Jenkins users of all experience-levels. By recognizing the numerous contributors to the Jenkins project, the Jenkins project creates and fosters a community-powered infrastructure for maintaining and further developing Jenkins. You can follow the Jenkins community on Twitter (@JenkinsCI ).
Media Contact:
Katelyn Campbell
PAN Communications
+1.617.502.4360
cloudbees@pancomm.com