Jenkins and Amazon EC2 Dynamic Agents

Reducing infrastructure costs and accelerating pipeline delivery by nearly half.

*Background: * This development and engineering team was tasked with enhancing the Continuous Deployment solution for the Brazilian division of an international online retailer. For this, they sought to create a unique pipeline to support all stages. Their primary challenge in doing so was the need to use conditionals.

Goals:  Reduce costs with infrastructure by using dynamic agents for the Continuous Deployment process.

"Jenkins rocks because it is a customizable robust solution that helped us reduce pipeline time by 50% – including deployment – and resource costs by 40%." Leandro Martins, DevOps Engineer

Solution & Results:  To achieve our goals, we introduced a Jenkins Declarative Pipeline using EC2 Dynamic Instances combined with Blue Ocean. We were able to spin up agents just when needed, which was vital for this endeavor.

Using a multi-branch project and the right conditionals on Pipeline, we discovered that we could reduce the build times by up to 60%. We also were able to reduce costs by using spot instances by up to 40%. The new pipeline provided the capability to build and deploy the artifact to our specific environment.

Jenkins rocks because it is a customizable, robust solution, and it yielded great results:

• reduced the pipeline time by 50% including the deployment process

• reduced resource costs by 40%

• provided pipeline visualization – using Blue Ocean –  which was helpful for developers