Internal self-service portal

Creating a self-service portal allows developers at a digital agency to automate services in just a few clicks.

Background: As a global full-service digital consultancy, we were looking to improve the developer and end-to-end life cycle of our website development and hosting platforms, driving a request portal with Jenkins as the backend automation between all platforms and toolsets

Goals:  To unify development and hosting automation across the company.

"Jenkins rocks because of the number of available plugins and the community support. I have been using Jenkins daily for over 5 years and cannot see another tool on the market that would provide this level of functionality and flexibility."

Jason Einon, Cloud Development Manager, Appnovation

Solution & Results:  Using Jenkins as the automation engine we have been able to create a self-service portal, allowing developers to request GKE clusters in any region around the world and then deploy their application to it with a few clicks.

We are integrating with a range of tools and Jenkins gives us the flexibility to communicate with them all easily:

• Jira for our governance

• Bitbucket for source code management

• Google Cloud as our core platform

Although not tested under load as of yet, we do not envisage any scalability issues due to the deployment architecture of the Jenkins engine and the compute nodes. The key capabilities we relied on were varied and included integrations between the Atlassian toolsets, Slack, and Kubernetes running on GKE with scalable worker node architecture.

As for results, they included:

• the ability to integrate with many platforms

• a single place for task automation

• audibility of tasks driven through log data for governance

• easy to measure metrics for future improvement targets