This topic teaches you best practices for using Jenkins with Google Kubernetes Engine. To implement this solution, see setting up Jenkins on Kubernetes Engine.
Jenkins is an open-source automation server that lets you flexibly orchestrate your build, test, and deployment pipelines. Kubernetes Engine is a hosted version of Kubernetes, a powerful cluster manager and orchestration system for containers.
When you need to set up a continuous delivery (CD) pipeline, deploying Jenkins on Kubernetes Engine provides important benefits over a standard VM-based deployment:
- When your build process uses containers, one virtual host can run jobs against different operating systems.
- Kubernetes Engine provides ephemeral build executors, allowing each build to run in a clean environment that’s identical to the builds before it.
- As part of the ephemerality of the build executors, the Kubernetes Engine cluster is only utilized when builds are actively running, leaving resources available for other cluster tasks such as batch processing jobs.
- Build executors launch in seconds.
- Kubernetes Engine leverages the Google global load balancer to route web traffic to your instance. The load balancer handles SSL termination, and provides a global IP address that routes users to your web front end on one of the fastest paths from the point of presence closest to your users through the Google backbone network.
For a deep dive into Jenkins on Kubernetes Engine, watch the Next 2018 talk on YouTube:
Reference Sites: Google Cloud
