Last week I was out in San Francisco at Oracle Code One (previously known as JavaOne). I had to wait until Thursday morning to give my session on “Continuous Delivery to Kubernetes with Jenkins and Helm”. This was the same title I presented in almost exactly the same spot back in February at IBM’s Index Conference but there were some significant differences in the content.
The first half was much the same. As you can see from the material on SlideShare and GitHub, it covers deploying Jenkins on Kubernetes via Helm and then setting up a pipeline with the Kubernetes plugin to build and deploy an application, again, using Helm. This time, I’d built a custom Jenkins image with the default set of plugins used by the Helm chart pre-installed which improved start-up times in the demo.
I had previously mounted in the Docker socket to perform the build but removed that and used kaniko instead. This highlighted one annoyance with the current approach used by the Kubernetes plugin: it uses exec on long-running containers to execute a shell script with the commands defined in the pipeline. The default kaniko image is a scratch image containing just the executor binary – nothing there to keep it alive, nor a shell to execute the script. In his example, Carlos uses the kaniko:debug image which adds a busybox shell but that requires other hoops to be jumped through because the shell is not in the normal location. Instead, I built a kaniko image based on alpine.
The biggest difference from earlier in the year was, perhaps not unsurprisingly, the inclusion of Jenkins X. I hadn’t really left myself enough time to do it justice. Given the normal terrible conference wifi and the GitHub outage earlier in the week, I had recorded a demo showing initial project creation, promotion, and update. I’ve added a voiceover so you can watch it for yourself below (although you probably want to go full-screen unless you have very good eyesight!).