Jenkins Distributed Builds

Abstract

You have learned how to implement various Jenkins jobs as free-style jobs and as pipeline jobs throughout this book. You have seen execution of these jobs by triggering builds, either manually or through some external trigger like Webhooks, SCM polling, etc. To execute these jobs, you used one Jenkins machine that had all the necessary hardware/software requirements. This kind of setup does not help in building a huge application with multiple time-consuming phases. Sequential execution of huge build phases will take a lot of time and ultimately will delay the release of the build. Frequent releases of such time-consuming builds are difficult to trigger and manage too. Another important problem is that you need to have all the necessary software installed on that single machine, which may not be possible due to hardware constraints. If that build machine breaks down, then replicating all the installations on a new build server would be a huge task. Modern applications demand testing to be done on different hardware/software combinations, which will not be possible if you have only one machine taking care of the entire build process.