CloudBees (previous CloudAve coverage), the PaaS company behind the Open Source Jenkins project, today announced that they are offering a high availability plugin to their Jenkins Enterprise product. They made this announcement at the Jenkins User Conference at New York City. This plugin will help in better uptime and improved governance/oversight along with increased productivity. This High Availability plugin is very important from the enterprise point of view. When you have large number of developers distributed around the world working on a project, the uptime of Jenkins server become very important. Any time lost in the process of getting the server rebooted, especially taking into account the timezone differences, can have significant impact on time bound projects. The time lost could range from several hours to days, drastically impacting the project timeline.
With the high availability plugin installed, a standby Jenkins master automatically detects the machine failure and steps up to take over the failed instance. The build is recovered and restarted in minutes. This ensures that there is no serious downtime affecting developer productivity. As enterprises consider PaaS as a serious option, the focus shifts to issues like security, high availability, etc.. In fact, at DeployCon 2012, we are planning to discuss all these topics related to PaaS from an enterprise standpoint. If you are an enterprise customer and want to know how PaaS can fit into your organization, you should attend the event. In fact, CloudAve is a media sponsor for the event and we have some free tickets exclusively for CloudAve readers. If you are interested in a free ticket, please drop your email in the comments section. CloudBees’s release of this HA plugin is targeted towards this increasing enterprise interest in PaaS.
CloudBees also announced few other plugins targeting the enterprises, especially focussed avoiding project failures. They are:
- Custom Update Center Plugin – A central update center containing approved plugin versions
- Validated Merge Plugin – This ensures only code that won’t break the build is checked in
- Secure Copy Plugin – This quickly and securely transfers jobs between Jenkins masters
- Fast Archiving Plugin
I am bullish in this blog on PaaS being the future of Cloud Services and we are also seeing enterprises warming up to PaaS. In this context, this announcement by CloudBees is the next logical step. I will be seriously interested in hearing from enterprise IT on their take on HA for Jenkins.
