Jenkins is the way to finally bring a retail giant into the 21st Century
Faster Integration Delivery
The flexibility for Jenkins was — and is — critical to a large established retail organization.
Background: Our main challenges were as follows;
Automation first: There is no current automation from development to deployment. Moving to an automation-first principle, we wanted a pipeline that fit this need.
Bespoke needs: As a heavily bespoke internal/on-prem environment, with a number of 3rd party applications and integrated systems, we needed a development pipeline that provided the flexibility to 'fit' around these requirements as these are not going away anytime soon.
Minimize the learning curve: Yes, let’s t-shape, but do it smart!
Future-proof: What gives us confidence that we can achieve this?
Faster and regular deployments: Go faster…but how?
Goals: Our main goal was to provide a consistent platform for internal shared services at Sainsburys.
"Shared libraries were a huge benefit to us. Jenkins provides all capabilities to integrate easily with numerous mainstream and bespoke systems."
*Solution & Results: * We dealt with our objectives/challenges thus;
Automation First: We are already heavy users of GitHub, thus integration with that was a given need. Jenkins hooks into GitHub, meaning this was a quick win, with just a tiny amount of understanding of 'how,' there was no need for any tremendous upskilling — meaning developers could keep on developing as they had been!
Bespoke Needs: We found that the Jenkins pipeline provided ease of integration with other services like AWS, ServiceNow, CheckMarx, MS. Teams/Slack, to name but a few, either using open source plugins or some custom groovy/bash script. Using this aspect of Jenkins meant we could achieve this need.
Keep the learning curve to a minimum: A few of us already had some Jenkins exposure in previous roles; using Jenkins meant that we were keeping a narrower tech scope than, say, if we were to use a managed service like that provided by AWS/Azure, thus minimizing any learning curve required for this. Plus, learnings are always shared.
Future proofing (well, as best as possible!): We were moving toward a microservices architecture. Jenkins already had a proven history in this tech. Once again, this was a really easy argument to win. Using Jenkins in/with K8s opens up a whole world of functionality and future-proofing for many years.
Go faster: With Jenkins? YES, OF COURSE, GO FASTER!!
We used the following capabilities:
Shared libraries
Kubernetes plugin
OAuth plugin (for SSO integration)
AWS plugins (S3, Credentials, Lambda, Secrets Mgr)
Emailer plugin
MS Teams plugin
Cucumber reporting plugin
The results were overwhelmingly positive:
100% confidence in a consistent and repeatable pipeline
Faster deployment times - from 5 days to several minutes
Easy onboarding for new applications
Easy integration with bespoke systems