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Ah, good 'ol Jenkins. It's on my list of software I never want to use again, twice.
One feature was really sweet though: being able to edit the Jenkinsfile script inline and run it. On the other hand, that encouraged the wild cowboy lands. Contrasted to GitHub Actions, you get to see how many commits it took to get right 🙃
Nobody will see me force push to "bugfix/gitlabCI" the 10th time today...
What's wrong with Jenkins? Works pretty great for automated scripts that need to run on a schedule, but I imagine you and this post specifically mean in reference to CI/CD
I work for a very large company which uses Jenkins for CI/CD and it’s an absolute nightmare. Granted, some of these issues may be related to how my company has it setup. I’m not in DevOps so I wouldn’t know. But these are my complaints:
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Can have incredibly long queue times in some cases. It takes forever to spin up additional build agents to meet demand. In one case we actually had to abort a deploy because Jenkins wasn’t spinning up more build agents, and our queue times were going to put us outside of our 3 HOUR maintenance window.
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Non-standard format for pipeline configuration files. It could just be JSON or YAML, but noooo, I have to learn something completely different that won’t transfer to other products.
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Dated and overly complicated UI with multiple UX issues. I can view the logs in a modal from the build page, but I can’t copy from them? Fuck off Jenkins.
I’m actively pushing my team to transition to GitHub actions, because it’s just better in every single way.
Ah man, yeah I use it for a much more constrained and very narrow use case. We only use GitHub actions for CI/CD, it can be clunky itself in some aspects but otherwise works great.
And if you have a large company and many teams, you think actions will help? (Aside from the UI issues you mention). Rebuilding the Jenkins from scratch now would probably get rid of most of your problems, but in a year is gonna be a mess. It's similar to how it's going to go with and CI.
Also, a good DevOps person or team will keep the Devs happy (or at least, not very unhappy) with any tool, a bad one will suck anyhow.
At least that's my experience.
The poorly documented pipeline scripting was always a nightmare for me, plus there’s two different types (declarative vs scripted) and so you have to be extra careful pulling examples from the Internet.
The build agent issue is 100% on your company not providing enough agents though. These days you can spin up agents as containers on k8s as needed.
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