BACKGROUND

• Shared CI service forming the backbone of an automated, continuous delivery pipeline for Kuali software
• Highly focused on the removal of manual configuration, process, and steps in order to get Kuali applications, built, deployed, and running

STABILITY UPGRADES

• Long term, stable, service running on the LTS version of Jenkins (currently 1.532.3)
• Automated process in place to enable keeping it upgraded to the latest Jenkins LTS release
• Long term stable version of Ubuntu (currently 12.04)
• Automated process to upgrade a stock Ubuntu 12.04 baseline AMI into a fully configured and operational Jenkins instance
• Automated process to easily spin up Jenkins instances in any Amazon region (Virginia, Portland, Northern California)
• All plugins pinned to a specific version known to be compatible with the LTS version of Jenkins

PERFORMANCE UPGRADES

• Runs on Amazon c3.xlarge instances
  • 350% more CPU (14 ECU's vs 4 ECU's)
  • Double the number of CPU cores (4 instead of 2)
• SSD - All CI activity occurs on solid state drives
  
  • two 40gb drives configured as a single 80gb RAID 0 partition
  • roughly twice as fast as a single SSD
  • 4x-5x faster than a standard EBS volume for typical CI jobs (build, unit test, etc)

FUNCTIONAL UPGRADES

• Unlimited nested views
  • Group and Organize jobs into views using regular expressions
  • Provides an easy way to avoid job "clutter" and keep things organized
• Dashboards and Pipelines
  • Provide a cohesive overall view of CI related activities
  • Code Health
  • Job Status
• Authorization & Authentication
  
  • Fully integrated with KIS and CAS
    • KIS groups manage authorization, CAS handles authentication
  • Wonderful thing about working with open source projects like Jenkins
    • Out of the box CAS plugin needed a very small patch in order to complete the integration with Kuali's CAS implementation
    • Able to patch the source and continue moving forward in a timely manner

COMPONENT UPGRADES

• Firefox
  
  • Headless mode
  • Can select between multiple versions 14, 22, 27
  • Automation in place for safely adding new Firefox versions as they get released
• Maven
  
  • 3.0.5
  • 3.1.0
  • 3.2.1
  • Automation in place for safely adding new Maven versions as they get released
• Java
  • JDK 6
  • JDK 7
  • JDK 8
  • Automation in place for safely adding new java versions as they get released