Case Study: Industry use cases of Jenkins

Jenkins is written in Java with plugins built for Continuous Integration purposes. Jenkins is used to building and testing your software projects continuously making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build.

Case Study of Topdanmark :

Delivering tools and infrastructure to drive innovation

Since the company relies heavily on IT-infrastructure, it is imperative that every bit just works.

With roughly 400 IT-related employees in the company and just about 80 on the operations team, the rest of the developers support approximately 2,000 other employees. Within the Ops group, There are six-man DevTools team who maintain the server platform that runs most of the company’s client/customer-related business applications. They keep approximately 1,000 servers alive. The servers are put into different categories, depending on which environment they live in.

Building automation with a highly-configurable Jenkins platform

Most of Topdanmark’s servers and all their desktops are virtualized, so they are easy to replace if something breaks down. In terms of Jenkins installations, they are all virtual.

Topdanmark has two Jenkins setups, legacy and CI/CD. In legacy setup, They have test, integration, release, and production environments. In CI/CD setup, they have a non-production and a production environment.

The legacy setup is part of a pre-scheduled handheld deployment cycle, customized to whichever team uses it. Due to all the customizations, it could take several days from the developer request to having a working Jenkins instance. This is of course take several time but using CI/CD will make it easy and fast.

The new setup is automated and easier to maintain. For this new iteration, the team took a different, more modern approach to deliver the service to its users. They created a self-service portal that allows anyone within the company to ‘order’ a Jenkins instance, a huge timesaver.