Chapter 1. Introducing Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees

Introduction

Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees (referred to as Jenkins Enterprise in this guide) is CloudBees’ professional version of Jenkins. Jenkins Enterprise provides a number of plugins that help organizations address three main problem areas, described below. Additionally, with Jenkins Enterprise, Jenkins users are provided with a stable release and frequent patches.

See release-notes.cloudbees.com for the change log.

The three main areas that Jenkins Enterprise helps Jenkins users in are:

Large Install Plugins

Jenkins Enterprise helps administrators manage large numbers of jobs, projects and teams. The plugins that help with large installation problems are:

  • Folders Plugin

    Folders help to create hierarchies or custom taxonomies to better manage large numbers of jobs

  • Templates Plugin

    Capture “sameness” of configuration information in one place that is propogated

  • Backup Scheduling Plugin

    Use Jenkins to backup Jenkins. No more cron jobs or error-prone custom scripts.

  • Plugin Usage Plugin

    Helps determine which plugins are in use by which jobs.

Optimized Utilization Plugins

Jenkins Enterprise helps administrators make better use of existing resources with the following plugins:

  • VMware ESXi/vSphere Auto-Scaling Plugin

    Make better use of existing VMWare resources by using machines in VMWare pools as slaves.

  • Label Throttle Build Execution Plugin

    Define the bare-metal limits for VMs being used as slaves. This helps in faster runs when multiple builds are running multiple VMs on a single bare-metal machine.

  • Even Load Strategy Plugin

    Change the default slave allocation algorithm of Jenkins to go to allocate jobs to free machines.

  • Skip Next Build Plugin

    Stop running builds if there are known errors that are being fixed.

Security Plugins

Jenkins Enterprise helps administrators secure their projects and their installations with the following plugins:

  • Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Plugin

    Setup sophisticated authorization policies to manage Jenkins

  • WikiText Descriptions Plugin

    Prevent potential XSS attacks due to HTML descriptions in Jenkins

  • Secure Copy Plugin

    Allow controlled and targetted sharing of artifacts between Jenkins jobs either on different Jenkins instances or within the same Jenkins instance.

  • Folders Plus Plugin

    Permits slave permissions to be associated with folders.