Jenkins really is a love / hate piece of devops kit for me. My users love the ease of creating simple, ad-hoc form UIs for parameterized jobs. The fact that all the configs are stored on the filesystem instead of a proper database makes it really difficult to host in a cloud environment. I know Jenkins was designed for CI / CD but it works really well as a cron-plus for arbitrary batch jobs. I desperately wish for it to be better for admins like me.
I’m not surprised in the least. This has been our main usecase for over 6 years. Prior to adopting Jenkins the whole team had to coordinate with a single crontab and had to jump through all sorts of hoops to avoid scheduling conflicts and to implement multi-stage jobs.
What I find funny is that Jenkins’ main competitors seem to be in the CI / CD market and no one I’m aware of is targeting the need for a devops command & control center. Apache Airflow and Rundeck might be potential alternatives, but neither of them are really well suited for cloud deployments either.
Jenkins really is a love / hate piece of devops kit for me. My users love the ease of creating simple, ad-hoc form UIs for parameterized jobs. The fact that all the configs are stored on the filesystem instead of a proper database makes it really difficult to host in a cloud environment. I know Jenkins was designed for CI / CD but it works really well as a cron-plus for arbitrary batch jobs. I desperately wish for it to be better for admins like me.
You might laugh, but this is exactly how a developer evangelist of Jenkins has once introduced it at a talk at our local Ruby users group.
I’m not surprised in the least. This has been our main usecase for over 6 years. Prior to adopting Jenkins the whole team had to coordinate with a single crontab and had to jump through all sorts of hoops to avoid scheduling conflicts and to implement multi-stage jobs.
What I find funny is that Jenkins’ main competitors seem to be in the CI / CD market and no one I’m aware of is targeting the need for a devops command & control center. Apache Airflow and Rundeck might be potential alternatives, but neither of them are really well suited for cloud deployments either.
What are other folks here using for this?
Fixing the storage issue is something KK has been working on for a while, and a bit part of “Jolt” as I understand it.
Gitlab twitter posted recently: How GitLab CI compares with the three variants of Jenkins