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The last company I worked at used Jenkins for all cron jobs. It has great reporting, supports complex jobs, has a million plugins. It worked really great.
by swalsh 8y ago
The last company I worked at used Jenkins for all cron jobs. It has great reporting, supports complex jobs, has a million plugins. It worked really great.
- mullingitover 8y agoIndeed, I was scratching my head reading this, wondering why they were reinventing Jenkins.
- petethepig 8y agoSame here, works great for us.
- nullbyte 8y agoMy thoughts exactly, this is a perfect use case for Jenkins. Talk about reinventing the wheel!
- rhinoceraptor 8y agoI always find Jenkins to be an absolute nightmare. The IT/“devops” people hand install it (most likely on your incredibly unreliable on-prem VSphere or whatever) and then immediately forget about it. Of course, mere developers aren’t not capable of such a feat of system administration as installing Jenkins. Then three months later when it starts failing due to disk space or memory issues you have to beg them to fix it so you can keep working.
- humbleMouse 8y agoSounds like your problem is with your admin department and not jenkins...
- setquk 8y agoAs the admin department of a company that runs Jenkins, it’s the second worst thing we have to keep alive (black duck software was the worst). Jenkins is leaky, unstable, unfriendly to the filesystem, buggy and poorly documented and tested. If you’re going to do anything like this it’s actually worth paying for team city or something else.
- tslug 8y agoAgreed. In a gig last year, I needed to improve the build turnaround times on a Jenkins system. After learning everything I could about Jenkins, I realized the correct answer was to delete it and rewrite my own version that ran on the local system, which was way, way faster and much easier to debug and maintain. Not having to commit/upload your code to a build server and then wait to get an executable/package back is an enormous time-saver just in that overhead alone, but even the build itself was faster, even though it was written entirely in bashscript. Go figure.
- Consultant32452 8y ago"Hey, I need this free plugin or I can't even build my app." "Maybe next year we'll have time to look into your plugin."
- gaius 8y agoAfter the first couple hundred "free" plugins you will find that you pay in other ways - this is the same in anything that supports a plugin. In any system I manage the cost of the plugin simply isn't an issue - if it's worth the money, it's easy to justify paying. But if it's free, and it becomes critical to the workflow, and in a year's time the author has abandoned it, then the "cost" is that we assume the responsibility for maintaining it forever, or we retool the workflow, or in some other way, it's very expensive. So paradoxically paid-for plugins are a much easier sell and requests for free stuff are shot down straight away.
- nradov 8y agoIf engineers didn't constantly reinvent the wheel they wouldn't have anything to blog about.
- travbrack 8y agoThis is my favorite comment on hackernews so far
- brightball 8y agoSame here. It’s great for it.
- amoshg 8y agoInteresting, isn't Jenkins mostly used for internal builds? I have a hard time imagining using it for things like marketing email cron jobs.
- humbleMouse 8y agoThe beauty of jenkins is that you can use it for pretty much anything.
- sanderjd 8y agoI tend to feel the opposite about things you can use for pretty much anything. I much prefer tools that are good for a single thing. I really disliked maintaining a Jenkins instance awhile back; maybe this "jack of all trades" ethos is part of the reason I felt that way.
- brightball 8y agoI tend to prefer simplified stack, especially for tools that don't need to be touched very often.
- sanderjd 8y agoI can't tell: are you saying that using Jenkins results in the simplified stack you prefer? If so, I don't agree; I think Jenkins is a very un-simple way to run from jobs.
- brightball 8y agoWhen I say simplified stack I mean fewer tools that must be learned and managed by people. Jenkins simplifies in that way.
- sanderjd 8y agoInteresting. I still don't see it that way. It seems less like a single tool when used in this way than multiple tools running alongside one another. Different strokes for different folks I suppose!
- ww520 8y agoThe blog said they are a Python shop. Jenkins being Java based probably won't sit well with them.
- dasil003 8y agoWhy? You can run python or anything else in Jenkins just fine.
- amyjess 8y agoI've personally moved all my Python scripts I run as cronjobs (for my company, not personal scripts) into Jenkins, and that's never been a problem. Everything is fully Dockerized, and Jenkins is set to just run the docker image with a specified entry point.
- amyjess 8y agoWe've been moving all our cronjobs into Jenkins lately. It works wonderfully, and I really recommend it.
- rooam-dev 8y agoHow do you test those complex jobs? How do you monitor jobs that get slower and slower? Can you make sure a job is not executed too soon? Can you have dynamic jobs (add/remove/enable/disable 1k per day)? Different requirements, different solutions.
- alexeiz 8y agoDoesn't Jenkins use a web interface to create, edit and manage jobs? Is it possible to put jobs in a VCS? Or manage jobs automatically (say with Ansible)?
- d0lph 8y agoYes to the web interface. VCS kinda, the jobs are all XML files, but Jenkins has built in change history like Wikipedia allowing reverts and comparisons.