Setup and scale Jenkins on Openshift 4

TL;DR The aim of this article is to give an overview about how one can setup the Jenkins to run and scale it on Kubernetes. In the given example Openshift 4 will be used, but the solution is general, so it can be deployed to any other Kubernetes platform as well.

About Jenkins

You know about Jenkins, right? It is an opensource automation server with a lot of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project. Of course there is a lot of other CI/CD solutions out there like GitLab CI, Travis CI, Circle CI, etc., but when we are talking about CI/CD Jenkins comes in mind as a first solution. It provides an easy way to install, it run as a standalone application in its own process with the built-in Java servlet container / application server, it has a bunch of available plugins, and it is configurable to the last bit.

It has some downsides too (the outdated UI), but the article is focusing only on the scalability part.

It has an official docker image, where you can find LTS releases as well: https://hub.docker.com/r/jenkins/jenkins .

Run the following command to start the Jenkins in docker: