DEVOPSdigest

The Jenkins project, comprised of a community of practitioners using open source Jenkins, announced the beta of Blue Ocean, a powerful new experience for Jenkins userse.

Building on the momentum of Jenkins 2, the Blue Ocean project was born. An improved, modern UX has been a consistent request of Jenkins users throughout the last three community surveys. With Blue Ocean, the UX is being built from the ground up to take full advantage of the power Jenkins is known for, while providing the ease of use which supports modern continuous delivery.

“Jenkins is tremendously powerful for automating complex CD pipelines, but the user experience doesn’t fully accommodate the growing user base - which now includes casual users, as well as the more traditional advanced users,” said James Dumay, Blue Ocean Community Lead and Senior Product Manager at CloudBees. “With Blue Ocean, you get a simplified view of the CD pipeline and see only the most relevant and commonly accessed information. Therefore, you are not overwhelmed with an excess of nonessential data. We’re extremely focused on presenting information in a very visual and intuitive way to provide clarity at-a-glance for every member of a DevOps team.”

CD pipelines are inherently complex, making it difficult for team members – from developers to IT operations to management – to get a common understanding of the progression of software through the pipeline. Blue Ocean addresses this by providing intuitive visualizations that can be easily understood by all members of the team. Failure analysis is a good example, as it is difficult and time consuming to identify, trace, investigate and resolve a problem. Using Blue Ocean, team members gain a graphical overview of the pipeline to quickly identify issues and can then drill down within the same interface to find the source of the problem.

Written as an extensible framework, Blue Ocean can be extended by anyone to make the powerful features of Jenkins simple to use.

Features available at beta include:

- Sophisticated visualizations of CD pipelines, allowing for fast and intuitive comprehension of software pipeline status.

- A Pipeline editor that makes automating CD pipelines approachable by guiding the user through an intuitive and visual process to create a pipeline.

- Personalization of the Jenkins UI to suit the role-based needs of each member of the DevOps team.

- Pinpoint precision when intervention is needed and/or issues arise. The Blue Ocean UI shows where in the pipeline attention is needed, facilitating exception handling and increasing productivity.

- Native integration for branch and pull requests enables maximum developer productivity when collaborating on code with others in GitHub.

“The phenomenal uptake of Jenkins 2 and the Pipeline functionality indicates to me that more teams are practicing modern continuous delivery. Blue Ocean continues the evolution of Jenkins to an easy-to-use, yet powerful automation platform accessed through a modern UI,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Jenkins founder and CTO at CloudBees. “Extensibility is the core of Jenkins’ DNA, which we are committed to retain as Jenkins evolves. Projects like Blue Ocean exemplify this philosophy of extensibility, while continuing to enhance the power and usability of Jenkins.”