Overview: Next Generation Continuous Delivery-Jenkins and Docker

There is a transformation happening in IT and it is made up of three waves of innovation: infrastructure, application architectures and process/methodologies. Lightweight Docker containers, microservices-based application architectures and continuous delivery are simultaneously feeding on each other and giving IT the ability to provide more value faster to the business, consumer and user.

To enable you to optimize speed to market with these new technology innovations, the Jenkins open source community in collaboration with CloudBees, the hub of enterprise Jenkins and DevOps, has released six Docker-related plugins to enable continuous delivery (CD) of containerized applications with Jenkins.

The specific plugins announced by the Jenkins project include the following:

• Docker Workflow – provides first-class support for Jenkins Pipeline to build real world CD pipelines for containerized applications using Jenkins and Docker
• Build and Publish – builds projects from a Dockerfile and pushes a tested and proven gold image to Docker Hub
• Docker Hub Notification – triggers downstream jobs when a tagged container is pushed to Docker Hub
• Docker Traceability – identifies which build pushed a particular container that is running in production and displays that on the Jenkins builds page
• Docker Slaves – uses Docker containers as standardized build environments shared between Jenkins masters to improve isolation and elasticity
• Docker Custom Build Environment – specifies customized build environments as Docker containers

The combination of continuous delivery being executed on applications running in Docker containers will allow us to see the kind of exponential growth of innovation in enterprise IT that we have seen in consumer and mobile applications over the past five years.