Microsoft Moves Open Source Jenkins Project To Azure

The Jenkins Project is to move onto Microsoft’s Azure platform in order to bolster security and capacity of the project as its infrastructure needs grow.

Jenkins is a popular open source automation server that provides an array of developer tools within an ecosystem for software projects for any size business or single individual.

Collaboration Deal

Specifically, Microsoft will offer a range of capabilities across Linux Virtual Machines, storage, scaling and load balancing, and software delivery on the Azure platform.

The collaboration between the two entities comes just after the recent launch of Jenkins 2.0, which enabled Jenkins users to more readily adopt continuous delivery practices and speed software delivery.

“As Jenkins continues to be widely recognized as the preferred open source choice for many organisations to succeed and utilise continuous software delivery, this relationship comes at the perfect time for both the Jenkins community and Microsoft,” said R. Tyler Croy, Jenkins project board member and community evangelist at CloudBees.

“Microsoft’s continued embrace of open source technologies is exciting and make it easier for their users to adopt tools like Jenkins.

“In essence, five years of tremendous growth for Jenkins has outpaced our organically grown, unnecessarily complex, project infrastructure.

“Migrating to Azure simplifies and improves our infrastructure in a dramatic way that would not be possible without a comprehensive platform consisting of: compute, CDN, storage and data-store services. Our partnership covers, at minimum, the next three years of the project’s infrastructure needs, giving us a great home for the future.”

“We’re proud to support the Jenkins community, furthering Microsoft Azure’s commitment to supporting choice and flexibility across the entire ecosystem,” added Corey Sanders, director of compute for Microsoft Azure in a statement.

“By delivering enterprise-proven infrastructure and services to the Jenkins project, we will help to support the tremendous growth of the Jenkins project.”

Open Source Champion?

Sanders expanded upon this development in a blog post, saying the collaboration will see the building of great things – at any scale.

Sanders explained that until now, the Jenkins project used a Linux-based infrastructure that had been running on a variety of platforms and servers, some provided by community members, others donated via the generosity of foundations and educational institutions.

“As the Jenkins project and demand for Jenkins has grown, the project needs a more reliable, more secure, and more agile Linux platform on which to build the next generations of their content distribution network and Java-based tools,” he said.

“To help the Jenkins project solve this problem, Microsoft is partnering with the Jenkins community to offer both compute resources and technical expertise to build a modern, robust development and delivery infrastructure on Linux and Java in the Azure cloud.

“Azure will also host the Jenkins Website and the Jenkins build that manages the website,” he added. “Jenkins will offer Jenkins 2 and legacy Jenkins builds to teams around the world using Azure’s secure and scalable infrastructure.”

A recent report found that recruiting open source talent is a top priority for HR departments, and recruiters are increasingly looking for more professional training credentials from their candidates.

Indeed, the 2016 Open Source Jobs Report, said that 65 percent of hiring managers say open source hiring will increase more than any other part of their business over the next six months, and 79 percent of hiring managers have increased incentives to hold on to their current open source professionals.

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