DEVOPSdigest

The Jenkins project, comprised of a community of practitioners using Jenkins, announced a new, simpler way to automate continuous delivery pipelines.

Jenkins Pipeline announces both declarative syntax and an initial version of a graphical Pipeline editor, making it significantly easier for DevOps teams - and especially non-programmers - to create and maintain continuous delivery (CD) pipelines.

CloudBees, the hub of enterprise Jenkins and DevOps, collaborated with the Jenkins community to develop the Pipeline Model Definition plugin that provides this new functionality.

With the introduction of the new functionality, Jenkins Pipeline now offers users multiple ways for DevOps teams to create and maintain CD pipelines using a method that matches their pipeline sophistication requirements, programming skill and CD experience level.

The new release provides a declarative syntax, an initial version of a graphical editor and shared pipeline libraries.

The new release of Jenkins Pipeline:

- Improves usability by making pipeline functionality available to novices and experts, programmers and non-programmers alike

- Increases DevOps team productivity by enabling users to rapidly create CD pipelines across a wide range of complexity – from simple to multi-branch complexity

- Accelerates adoption of CD through ease of use, reuse and extensibility

CD pipelines can be inherently complex, making it difficult for team members of varying skills – from developers to IT operations to management – to programmatically create pipelines. The functionality provided in Jenkins Pipeline now enables any user to easily build and maintain CD pipelines either graphically or with code. For example, Declarative Pipeline Syntax allows construction of pipelines using simple, predefined format to define the stages and steps in a pipeline. This provides a straightforward structure and simplified flow, making software pipeline creation accessible to all users.

"Declarative pipeline combines the power of the flexibility of Jenkins Pipeline and the simplicity of Blue Ocean, the new user experience for Jenkins,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Jenkins founder and CTO at CloudBees. "Defining and evolving continuous delivery pipeline is made not only easier but also pleasant, which is an important milestone for making continuous delivery accessible for everyone.”