Hard Mock Cafe

In the first part of this little series I was talking about some of the difficulties you have to tackle when dealing with microservices, and how the Job DSL Plugin can help you to automate the creation of Jenkins jobs. In today’s installment I will show you some of the benefits in maintenance. Also we will automate the job creation itself, and create some views. Let’s recap what we got so far. We have created our own DSL to describe the microservices. Our build Groovy script iterates over the microservices, and creates a build job for each using the Job DSL. So what if we want to alter our existing jobs? Just give it a try: we’d like to have JUnit test reports in our jobs. All we have to do, is to extend our job DSL a little bit by adding a JUnit publisher: freeStyleJob("${name}-build") { ... steps { maven { mavenInstallation('3.1.1') goals('clean install') } } publishers { archiveJunit('/ta...

Jenkins CI is a great tool for automating your build and deployment pipeline. You set up jobs for build, test, deployment and whatever, and let Jenkins do the work. But there’s a catch. In the recent blog post Bringing in the herd I already talked a bit about the difficulties you have to tackle if you are dealing with microservices: they are like rabbits! When you start with a project, there may be only a couple of microservices, but soon there will be a few dozens or even hundreds.Setting up jobs for these herds is a growing pain you have to the master, and that’s where the Job DSL comes to the rescue. This post is the start of a small series on the Job DSL. One lesson we already learned about microservices is that you have to automate everything. Even – or especially – the configuration of the tooling used to build, deploy, and monitor your application. Not to mention the things you have to do to run the application like distributing, load balancing etc. But let’s start with the b...

Everybody is doing microservices at the time of writing. They promise to solve the problems we had with monolithic architectures: They are easy to deploy, scale, understand, and throw away, they are resilient and may be implemented using different technologies . That’s hell a lot of promises, but there are also downsides: Microservices come in herds, and herds are hard to handle ;-) In our current project we use the Jenkins CI server to implement a continuous integration pipeline. For every microservice we have a couple of jobs: Build : Compile the classes, build a jar, run the JUnit tests ITest : Run the integration tests against the built jar Deploy : Deploy the microservice to the environment These steps are run one after another using the Build Pipeline Plugin . But when it comes to getting an overview to the state of the jobs, you have few choices: The All-View is quite inadequate for that. Even if you have only a couple of dozens of services, there are three job...