Revolutionizing DevOps with Jenkins

When it comes to improving software delivery, understanding the relationship between DevOps and Jenkins is crucial. As a leader in both Jenkins solutions and DevOps innovation, CloudBees is here to help you navigate how Jenkins fits into the broader DevOps ecosystem. What makes it such a game-changer for workflows, CI/CD automation, and helping teams streamline their software development lifecycle (SDLC)?

To answer these and other questions, let’s explore the role of Jenkins in the evolution of DevOps, and how Jenkins’ capabilities have helped revolutionize the way teams automate, integrate, and streamline software development and operations workflows. 

We’ll also cover how Jenkins differs from other DevOps tools, and highlight the outcomes that engineering teams regularly experience as a result of integrating Jenkins into their tech stack, including faster deployments, better collaboration, and greater reliability in software delivery.

Whether you're new to Jenkins or curious about its deeper connection to DevOps, it’s important to understand why it has become such a trusted tool for modern software teams.

At its core, Jenkins is an open-source automation server used by organizations to help speed up the overall software development process. Over the years it has become a go-to DevOps tool for establishing and managing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines—an essential process for automating code integration, testing, and deployment, where CloudBees builds on Jenkins to deliver enterprise-grade CI/CD solutions.

By orchestrating the entire SDLC with CI/CD automation, software development teams can build, test, and deploy software at greater speed, quality, and scale.

Jenkins is written in the Java programming language and runs on Java-based web application servers such as Apache Tomcat. Its deep plugin repository allows for rich customization to meet almost any project requirements.

As one of the earliest and most widely used DevOps tools, Jenkins is a very expansive and versatile platform with many features and customization options. However, there are a handful of core capabilities that have solidified its position as a DevOps stack must-have.

Jenkins’ server-based architecture provides DevOps teams with more stable and secure CI/CD automation. Jenkins leverages server operating system technology and network security capabilities to minimize the number of external processes that interface with it, plus multifactor authentication to keep access limited to the fewest number of users possible.

Being a free, open-source tool allowed Jenkins to quickly grow in popularity and spread all across the globe. This not only helped spread the message and availability of strong DevOps practices but also spawned an active and ever-growing support community of Jenkins fans and practitioners. The result is an extensive Jenkins knowledge base featuring comprehensive documentation and solutions to common implementation and operational challenges.

Jenkins is widely considered to be simple to install and configure to your needs. Its interface features built-in error checks and help resources to ease the set-up process, plus direct access to the aforementioned user community for further support. Jenkins is a flexible tool that runs seamlessly on all standard operating systems—including Mac OS, Windows, and Unix—and is compatible with other popular DevOps tools such as Git, Docker, Maven, and Kubernetes.

With a repository of over 2,000 plugins, Jenkins’ capabilities can be extended and tailored for any process, application, or industry. These plugins allow DevOps teams to integrate other important tools and sources into their Jenkins environment, improving usability and overall CI/CD automation. All Jenkins plugins are written in Java and can be easily downloaded and installed from the Jenkins Plugins Index.

While Jenkins has long been a cornerstone of the DevOps ecosystem, it's important to understand how it compares to other tools in the space—like Azure DevOps. By exploring their differences, you can better determine which tool, or combination of tools, best fits your team’s needs and goals.

Both Jenkins and Microsoft’s Azure DevOps Services are powerful DevOps suites for CI/CD automation. However, the tools differ in a number of ways, including:

• Implementation and Setup: Azure DevOps has a fairly structured implementation approach which makes it less adaptable and suitable for certain use cases or situations, particularly non-Microsoft environments. Jenkins is fully flexible and fits in seamlessly with any existing tech stack.

• Integration and Customization: Azure DevOps integrates well within the Microsoft ecosystem, but requires extensive configuration changes to integrate with non-Microsoft products. It also has a more limited number of compatible plugins for extension and customization. Jenkins, on the other hand, integrates easily with a wide range of third-party tools and platforms, and has an unmatched repository of 2,000+ plugins for limitless customization.

• Support: Being a newer platform with fewer users, support resources are more limited for Azure DevOps. Conversely, Jenkins benefits from an extensive user community with over a decade’s worth of knowledge content. Plus, the open-source nature of Jenkins means that platform improvements come directly from the feedback and experience of seasoned users.

Jenkins and Kubernetes perform different functions in the software development process and are complementary rather than duplicative.

As discussed above, Jenkins is an open-source automation server that helps DevOps teams automate software development pipelines with CI/CD. Kubernetes, on the other hand, is an open-source container orchestration platform that allows DevOps teams to efficiently manage and scale containerized applications—lightweight, standalone software packages that include everything needed to run an application, from code to runtime and dependencies, making them portable and consistent across environments for easier management and scalability.

By integrating Jenkins and Kubernetes together, DevOps organizations can further enhance their deployment pipeline with secure testing, monitoring, and rollback strategies, ensuring a reliable end-to-end software delivery process.

DevOps and Jenkins go together like macaroni and cheese—or team collaboration and Google Docs. By leveraging Jenkins’ capabilities and DevOps best practices, software development teams experience several positive benefits and outcomes:

• Task Automation: With Jenkins, teams can automate the steps needed to build, test, and deploy software, saving a great deal of manual effort and reducing the amount of code required. 

• Time Savings: Jenkins-powered teams spend less time preparing and testing builds giving development teams more time to work on new product innovations.

• Quality Improvements: By automating pipeline steps and cutting down on the amount of manual coding work required, teams using Jenkins can avoid human errors and deliver more reliable products.

• Cost Reduction: The reduction in manual labor and cloud resources needed for testing and deployment that Jenkins facilitates leads to cost savings in the SDLC.

• Continuous Deployment: The CI/CD automation of Jenkins speeds up the overall SDLC and allows for rapid, ongoing product delivery, continually providing end customers with the latest, most up-to-date and bug-free software version.

Yes. Jenkins remains one of the most widely used DevOps tools today, with companies from nearly every country in the world using its CI/CD automation capabilities to improve their software delivery processes. As an open-source tool, Jenkins is constantly evolving and improving, and is as relevant as ever for DevOps optimization in 2025.

The Jenkins community publishes a Jenkins product roadmap with features that are in-the-works or on the list for future consideration. Roadmap items for 2025 and beyond include enhancements such as:

• Plugin management improvements

• Permissions management improvements

• External fingerprint storage

• Java 17 support

• Automated dependency management

• General UI/UX improvements

When it comes to DevOps, Jenkins is the gold standard. Its capabilities and flexibility are unrivaled, and it’s easy to set up and get started. Challenges can emerge later on, however, as your organization grows and your usage of Jenkins expands.

With increased scale comes the need for more centralized management, enhanced customization and security, and a more reliable infrastructure. Plus, as CI/CD pipelines grow in complexity and scale, the costs associated with maintaining the necessary infrastructure can escalate rapidly. That’s where CloudBees comes in.

The CloudBees CI platform pairs DevOps and Jenkins to deliver better CI/CD manageability and reliability with less downtime and cost. CloudBees CI provides:

• Efficient resource management to significantly reduce infrastructure and compute costs, providing substantial financial savings.

• A stable, high-performing environment with built-in security and best practices.

• The automation of routine maintenance tasks such as software updates, security patches, and plugin management.

• Continuous updates without downtime, maintaining high availability, robust failover mechanisms, and continuous operation of CI/CD pipelines.

CloudBees solutions integrate with your entire set of tools to secure code from development to deployment. We help organizations foster continuous alignment across development, security, operations, and audit using real-time control assessments, allowing you to orchestrate testing during development and enforce role-based access control, gates, and thresholds throughout each stage of the SDLC. 

This brings developers, shared services, application owners, and lines of business together to help your team release products faster and safer.

Talk to an expert today to discover how CloudBees can equip your team with the tools to thrive in the modern software development landscape.