CloudBees contributions to Jenkins X - March 2020
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March has been a really busy month for us working on Jenkins X, several exciting projects are now well underway.
Recently at office hours we discussed a proposal to improve how we provision the cloud resources (storage buckets, service accounts & cryptographic keys) that Jenkins X requires.
The idea behind this enhancement is that some companies may require the infrastructure to be provisioned by a user (someone in operations perhaps) that requires a different set of permissions than the user that runs jx boot to install Jenkins X.
Previously this happened when a user ran jx boot. But from community feedback we learned that some users would like this process split.
To help with this we are in the process of developing Terraform modules that you can use to create the necessary resources.
Work on this has been moving really quickly and we have been focusing on support for GKE, EKS & AKS.
We are really excited to see the awesome contributions from Heba Elayoty of Microsoft on adding support for Azure Kubernetes Service in Jenkins X.
If you do not use Terraform and you have another way of provisioning infrastructure don’t worry, we’ll be providing lots of information in the docs on exactly what you will need to create before booting Jenkins X.
For anyone that would like more information or would like to contribute to the Terraform modules you will find the git repository for GKE here and EKS here.
Another area that some of the team are working in right now is the implementation of the depreciation policy, PRs are being lined up to remove commands that have been market for deprecation. This will help cut down the code surface area a bit and make Jenkins X a bit easier to maintain.
The labs team has also been extremely busy experimenting with helm3 and helmfile with a view to using it as a foundation for multi cluster support in Jenkins X. We still have a bit to learn before we start to roll this into Jenkins X. One of the next areas we’ll be experimenting with is what the upgrade process from a helm2 environment to a helm3 environment will look like. You can jump over to the new lab’s documentation for more information on experiments and you can find the lab’s issue tracker here.
We have also fixed around 60 issues this month.
We are constantly tracking our progress on closing out issues. The graph below shows the number of opened and closed issues on a weekly basis since September and the delta between them.
The trend over time clearly shows we are making good progress.
We are delighted to announce the March release (Release 8) of the CloudBees Jenkins X Distribution is now available. As always, you can download the latest distribution here.