A day at DevOps World in Lisbon

On this second day here at DevOps World in Lisbon, I built a very interesting and intensive program of sessions to attend which I will explain to you more in detail below. This was also the opportunity for us (Arnaud and I) to meet our main customer from whom we are working with Jenkins X each day. It is always interesting to be able to meet physically the people with whom we collaborate, even if they are working around the world.

I started the day by attending the global keynote. Amazing show and presentations of many CloudBees products.

The 2 interesting points presented during the keynote was the new Jenkins X Cloud Service in Google Cloud and the new CloudBees Jenkins X UI.

Apart from that, I really appreciate the culture of CloudBees, they appear to be a very cool and trendy company and that’s exactly younger people (like me) in the tech are looking for ;-).In fact, the image you reflect on the world is very important. Nice example with the superhero story used by CloudBees.

Jenkins X Introduction

After the keynote, I attended the very popular Jenkins X Introduction session. Full room for this session and it’s very interesting to see the huge amount of people interested in this new technology we are using it every single day. Honestly, I only attended this session for only 1 thing: The CloudBees Jenkins X User Interface. All other topics, we already covered it. However, it’s always important to attend such kind talks in order to structure the basic concepts for ourselves in order to better share knowledge.

Training-as-Code, CI/CD pipeline for CloudBees University

Good session about how the CloudBees University team is using CI/CD pipelines to build the platform courses: https://standard.cbu.cloudbees.com/.
They presented us, how they are using AWS EC2 machines, AWS S3 and Jenkins and Terraform to build the complete workshop platform.

It was really interesting for me to compare what we are currently creating workshop environments at dbi services with AWS EC2 machines and Terraform scripts. Even if it’s simpler and smaller, I personally think we are in the right way.

Then, the presented us the next generation of training platform they are currently working on, by using Jenkins X ecosystem and other tools in addition such as:

• K8s
• Helm
• Jenkins X
• Golang

They are trying to build a kind of self-service platform and optimize the delivery by using the Jenkins X ecosystem. An important point was raised; it is the multitude of local environments that must be addressed when providing virtual machines to trainers. Next-generation of training platforms is more and more going to Kubernetes as it’s becoming the common virtualization platform for all infrastructures. And what’s the best tool to use when you want to make CI/CD on top of Kubernetes? Jenkins X!

Jenkins X latest and greatest with James Strachan and James Rawlings

Again a very popular and interesting session about Jenkins X mostly done by one the Jenkins X “guru” James Strachan. Personally, I’m always admirative about people in tech giving live demo talks without any slides. James Strachan is this kind of person. At the same time, it was really nice to personally meet him, other than Slack and GitHub (https://jenkins-x.io/community/) to discuss with him and asked him some questions related to Jenkins X troubleshooting for our use case such as the upgrade of Jenkins X for instance. I have now my answer about how to upgrade properly Jenkins X 😀 !

The session was focused on Jenkins X new features such as the new web UI.

During the session, I had the time to create a new cluster on GKE (10 minutes) and deploy the new UI as follows:

Jenkins X Optimized for GCP by Craig Barber from Google Cloud

This session was about some best practices when deploying Jenkins X on Google Cloud but not only…Because in fact, there were a lot of interesting points to consider even if you are not using GCP to deploy Jenkins X. All best practices and needed information can be found here: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/jenkins-integration-samples/tree/jenkins-x/jenkins-x. The next step for me will be to study in detail the all deployment strategy used by Google Cloud team even the Terraform project and re-adapt it as possible to our on-premise context.