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CloudBees contributions to Jenkins X - April 2020

CloudBees contributions to Jenkins X - April 2020
By Deane Smith |
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Despite the challenges of this particular time in the world it amazes me how members of the Jenkins X community continue to rise up and generously contribute to the project. This month’s CJXD release is with no lack of upstream community contributions, thus I’m kicking off this blog with a very sincere THANK YOU to the contributors.

A number of folks here at CloudBees continue to focus on Jenkins X stability and supportability. In parallel, other folks are focused on new features and expanding support for additional platforms. In an effort to help us continue these efforts, we completed the plan to remove code for Jenkins static masters in favor of going full-on with Tekton pipelines. In addition, a number of unsupported commands scheduled for deprecation have now been removed from the code.

The benefits of deprecating unsupported features and commands allows for more focus, clearer messaging, better documentation, better quality, faster development of new features, and expanding Kubernetes provider support. You can learn more about our decision to remove traditional Jenkins masters here.

This month’s CJXD release continues to add value with stability improvements as well as some minor enhancements. A total of 38 relevant issues have been addressed since the previous release. Over 40 total upstream pull requests were merged since the previous release and all of them have been absorbed in to this CJXD release. Community members submitted 10 of these PR’s and we greatly appreciate these contributions!

Looking ahead to the upcoming CJXD release in May, a good deal of energy over the past three months has been spent on several significant efforts which will begin to surface. Without upsetting the product management team too much, I’ll just write about some of the things the engineering team is working on, BUT not necessarily what will be released or when…

  • Lighthouse: Andrew Bayer took over completing James Strachan’s initial stab at Lighthouse (Lighthouse is our very own lighter-weight Prow substitute). Andrew has been working on it nearly full-time and it really shows. Lighthouse is running great in our busy production cluster and, well, keep your eye out upstream since I expect great things VERY soon.

  • Terraform: Hardy Ferentschik has been working diligently on an effort to eventually remove cloud orchestration concerns from Jenkins X. As a result we have some awesome new Terraform scripts for GKE and EKS where you can prepare your cluster and then leverage jx boot to deploy Jenkins X. I anticipate official support for this in an upcoming CJXD release, hopefully very soon. You can read more about this in the upstream Jenkins X Documentation.

  • CLI: Adam Magan did a huge amount of tedious work removing code for a multitude of deprecated commands. Thankfully that is largely behind us and Adam can move on to other more gratifying tasks. You can read more about which commands were deprecated in the CJXD 9 Release Notes.

  • JX Labs: Dave Conde disappeared a couple weeks ago to work with James Strachan and James Rawlings on something and I expect him to resurface in several weeks. If he doesn’t return, I’ll be sending out a search party.

So there you have it. Enjoy the release. Please stay safe, take care of yourself, and take care of each other.

Deane