Jenkins September 2022 Newsletter

amurleopard

September 2022

Monthly Newsletter

Welcome to the Jenkins Newsletter! This is a compilation of progress within the project, highlighted by Jenkins Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for the month of September.

Happy reading!

Security Update

Two security advisories during September with "special" nature for Jenkins core
- One was only impacting very specifically configured instance
- The other was only impacting three successive weekly releases

Infrastructure Update

Dropping JDK8 from all agents and controllers processes with the 2.361.1 September LTS
Joint-work with JFrog (our sponsor) to decrease the bandwidth usage (50 Tb per month, should be under 10 Tb per month) of the Jenkins' Maven repository repo.jenkins-ci.org
Digital Ocean renewed their sponsorship with increased credits ($18,000 for 1 year)
Observability of ci.jenkins.io for plugin developers using Datadog’s (also a sponsor) metric collection on ephemeral agents. We hope to also use traces in the future
New "All-in-one" agent template built with Packer: whether your builds are running on a VM or a container, in AWS, Azure or Digital Ocean, you have the same tools in the same locations

Platform Update

Loaner computers for ppc64le are gone
- IBM suspended the loaner machine program
arm/v7 agent Docker images
Linux packages use systemd instead of System V init
Exit lifecycle change in the Docker images
Blue Ocean container image deprecation (jenkinsci:blueocean)
Container repository management for Jenkins agents
- Simplifying the release process
JDK 11 now required since Jenkins 2.357 and 2.361.1 LTS
- Ongoing minor tasks
  - Dropping Java 8 from the Docker agents - merged, not yet released
  - Plugins beginning to require Java 11, ongoing process
- Jenkins works with Java 17 since 2.355 and 2.346.1 LTS
- Ongoing, a few recent reports, working well
- Jenkins infra planning to put one or more of the infra machines on JDK 17
- Timeline indicates end of Java 11 first level maintenance Sep 2023, security fixes for several more years after end of first level maintenance
- More than 11,000 Java 17 installs reporting worldwide with Jenkins in September

Documentation Update

DigitalOcean and Jenkins partnership continues to grow!

Thanks to DigitalOcean’s generosity, Jenkins has access to more resources than ever before, such as utilizing the DigitalOcean platform to continue development and share progress made. We can dedicate our time and resources more fully, allowing users to engage and make an impact. Read the story on our blog.

Java 11 or Newer

Beginning with Jenkins 2.357 (released on June 28, 2022) and the forthcoming 2.361.1 LTS release, Jenkins requires Java 11 or newer. Additionally, beginning with Jenkins 2.355 (released on June 14, 2022) and Jenkins 2.346.1 LTS (released on June 22, 2022), Jenkins supports Java 17. Plugins have already been prepared in JENKINS-68446. Use the Plugin Manager to upgrade all plugins before and after upgrading to Jenkins 2.357. Read the blog post about Java 11 requirement for more information.

Thinking About Contributing to Open Source?

Ponder no more! We’ve created the "Improve a plugin" developer tutorial for new contributors. We’d love to work with you!

About Blue Ocean

Blue Ocean status

Blue Ocean will not receive further functionality updates. Blue Ocean will continue to provide easy-to-use Pipeline visualization, but it will not be enhanced further. It will only receive selective updates for significant security issues or functional defects.

Alternative options for Pipeline visualization, such as the Pipeline: Stage View and Pipeline Graph View plugins, are available and offer some of the same functionality. While not complete replacements for Blue Ocean, contributions are encouraged from the community for continued development of these plugins.

The Pipeline syntax snippet generator assists users as they define Pipeline steps with their arguments. It is the preferred tool for Jenkins Pipeline creation, as it provides online help for the Pipeline steps available in your Jenkins controller. It uses the plugins installed on your Jenkins controller to generate the Pipeline syntax. Refer to the Pipeline steps reference page for information on all available Pipeline steps.

Advocacy & Outreach Update

Jenkins & She Code Africa Contributhon

This program aimed to create a more diverse, inclusive, and innovative culture within the African open source ecosystem, by matching African women in technology with sponsor and mentor open source organizations. The 6 mentees joined the Jenkins project came from Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. They brought 3 different projects to the Jenkins community:

Many thanks to the dedicated mentors from the Jenkins project: Angélique Jard, Kevin Martens, Kristin Whetstone, and Mark Waite.

See the full blog post Expanding Open Source in Africa.

SCaLE19X

It was great to have returned to in person events! Thank you SCaLE for hosting us. See you again in March 2023!

Google Summer of Code Midterm Status Update

2022 GSoC Contributors worked hard to improve the following projects. In a midterm webinar, they presented their progress, lessons learned and achievements:

Recording is at: [Jenkins Online Meetup]: GSoC Midterm Status Update & Demos - July 21, 2022

Slides are at: Jenkins Online Meetup - GSoC 2022 Midterm Demos

Plugin Health Scoring System by Dheeraj Singh Jodha
Jenkinsfile Runner Action for GitHub Actions by Yiming Gong
Automatic git cache maintenance on the controller by Hrushikesh Rao
Pipeline Step Documentation Generator Improvements by Vihaan Thora
Link to all projects: Google Summer of Code in Jenkins

Hacktoberfest

jmMeessen announced …

September was the perfect time to prepare for Hacktoberfest. We got a jump start by finding projects to contribute to, adding "Hacktoberfest" tag to projects, or getting familiarized with Git. To get the deets see the blog post about Preptember.

https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2022/10/13/jenkins-newsletter/