Introduction
Welcome to the Operator Service for Jenkins® documentation! This documentation is the reference material for all available features and capabilities. This document outlines what problems it solves, how it works and how to get started.
Operator Service for Jenkins® is a cloud-native Jenkins platform for scalable and cost-effective continuous integration in the public cloud. Built on top of Kubernetes, our Operator Service for Jenkins® enables you to fully automate Jenkins pipelines, plugins and any additional configurations needed.
By putting human operational knowledge into software operators we can reduce day one activities related to installing, patching and manual work within the dev tooling space. We are aiming to enable customers to use the product on any public cloud platform like Azure, AWS, RedHat Marketplace (OpenShift), as well as supporting self-hosted offerings.
Typical day 0 activities involve setting up the infrastructure layer like networking, runtime, and monitoring. This often leads to some manual work, integration with enterprise tooling and a number of tickets to be created. Things like OS upgrades, patching, infrastructure life-cycle management are ongoing tasks which take significant time, especially at scale within a large organization.
From a developer’s point of view, day 1 activities are likely onboarding processes, installing Jenkins, configuring plugins or setting up the first pipeline. With Operator Service for Jenkins® we wanted to vastly simplify this process and give our customers the possibility to configure most of it using code to get more out of the engineering effort to solve business problems.
A Centralized Jenkins platform enables our customers to make sure that the security and compliance is at the right level and constantly audited. It is really important to protect customer services from common security risks such as misconfigurations or vulnerable external plugins. With Operator Service for Jenkins® we want to minimize the distance between onboarding and delivering software in production.
At the end of the day, all of these make it difficult for users to navigate and use this technology, especially at scale within large organizations. This often leads to a lot of manual work, and likely duplication of effort within your organization. All those repetitive, laborious tasks can be seamlessly automated by Operator Service for Jenkins.
This section details important architectural aspects to give you a quick understanding of how it fits into your existing infrastructure and working procedures.
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Due to the legacy nature of Jenkins and the high security risk introduced by the plugins ecosystem, security is a very important and serious concern. Out-of-the-box security hardening happens just after the Jenkins deployment becomes ready.