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Linux Foundation Launches Jenkins X Training Course

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by Mike Vizard

The Linux Foundation announced this week it has launched a training course for Jenkins X, an opinionated instance of a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform designed specifically to be deployed on Kubernetes clusters.

Created in collaboration with the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), an arm of The Linux Foundation, the LFS268 – CI/CD with Jenkins X training course is designed to teach IT professionals how to create an automated software delivery pipeline and promote a cloud-native application into a production environment.

IT professionals who complete the course will be able to install and operate Jenkins X, build pipelines in Jenkins X, create and import existing projects into Jenkins X, extend and modify pipelines and create custom build packs.

Priced at $299, the launch of the LFS268 – CI/CD with Jenkins X training course comes on the heels of another training class launched by the Linux Foundation in collaboration with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that focuses on Kubernetes itself.

Clyde Seepersad, senior vice president and general manager for training and certification at The Linux Foundation, says interest in Jenkins X is rising because IT teams want to be able to build and deploy containerized applications on a Kubernetes cluster versus relying on a CI/CD platform deployed on legacy server platforms.

Of course, many IT teams are using the open source Jenkins platform to build both monolithic and microservices-based applications. However, there is also a growing base of IT organizations that are focused on building and deploying applications based on microservices that were constructed using containers. Jenkins X is intended to appeal to those organizations.

From a DevOps process perspective, moving to Jenkins X from Jenkins is not an especially big hurdle, Seepersad notes.

Along with Jenkins, the Spinnaker continuous delivery platform developed by Netflix and Tekton pipelines created by Google, Jenkins X is one of the foundation projects on which the CDF was formed last year. While Jenkins enables a more open-ended approach to building pipelines, Jenkins X is more prescriptive in terms of how a CI/CD platform should be deployed and managed.

Jenkins X is also the first CI/CD platform to support Tekton pipelines, which enable IT teams to reuse pipelines across multiple CI/CD platforms.

In general, Kubernetes creates an opportunity to re-engineer DevOps processes. While most organizations that have embraced DevOps have mature CI processes in place, CD has often proven to be more challenging. Each platform that DevOps teams push code to is unique, which can make it difficult to push code in an automated fashion. Kubernetes presents a consistent set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that should make it easier to automate CD.

Naturally, there are a lot more options when it comes to CI/CD since when Jenkins first became truly stable way back in 2011. The challenge facing the CDF and its allies will be pulling the massive ecosystem that exists around Jenkins today forward on to Jenkins X.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a veteran IT journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the technology industry, having previously served as Editor-in-Chief of both CRN and InfoWorld and as editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he oversaw titles including eWEEK, CIO Insight and Baseline. Over his career he has also edited or contributed to a wide range of enterprise technology publications, including IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, ComputerWorld, TMCNet and Digital Review, and he later led editorial for CTOEdge.com. His reporting and analysis span software development, cloud computing, cybersecurity, IT channel strategy and, more recently, artificial intelligence and DevOps practices. A recognized voice in enterprise IT journalism, Vizard is known for tracking emerging technology trends as they move from early adoption into mainstream enterprise use. He now serves as Chief Content Officer for Techstrong Group, where he oversees editorial strategy across the full network — DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Cloud Native Now, Digital CxO, Techstrong.ai, TechStrong.IT, Techstrong Semi and PlatformEngineering.com — in addition to writing and hosting content for Techstrong TV and the Techstrong Gang podcast.

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