Jenkins Operator

What's Jenkins Operator?

Jenkins operator it's a Kubernetes native operator which fully manages Jenkins on Kubernetes. It was built with immutability and declarative configuration as code in mind.

It provides out of the box:

• integration with Kubernetes
• pipelines as code
• extensibility via groovy scripts or configuration as code plugin
• security and hardening

Problem statement and goals

The main reason why we decided to write the jenkins-operator is the fact that we faced a lot of problems with standard Jenkins deployment. We want to make Jenkins more robust, suitable for dynamic and multi-tenant environments.

Some of the problems we want to solve:

• volumes handling (AWS EBS volume attach/detach issue when using PVC)
• installing plugins with incompatible versions or security vulnerabilities
• better configuration as code
• lack of end to end tests
• handle graceful shutdown properly
• security and hardening out of the box
• orphaned jobs with no jnlp connection
• make errors more visible for end users
• backup and restore for jobs history

Documentation

1. Installation
2. Getting Started
3. How it works
4. Developer Guide

Contribution

Feel free to file issues or pull requests.

TODO

Common:

• simple API for generating Kubernetes events using one common format
• create Jenkins Jobs View for all jobs managed by the operator
• code clean up and more tests

Base configuration:

User configuration:

• backup and restore for Jenkins jobs running as standalone job (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• trigger backup job before pod deletion using preStop k8s hooks
• verify Jenkins configuration events