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When it comes to providing continuous integration and deployment solutions for your team or enterprise, there are some great options, but arguably none are more popular and better than the full package. Jenkins.

Jenkins is an open source Java-based automation server that offers a host of useful and sometimes impressive plugins to support anything from building, deploying, all the way to fully automating any project.

Not only that, because Jenkins has been around for quite some time (development started in 2004), its technology is proven and quite mature, with extensive documentation and resources, not to mention the outstanding open source community behind it.

First, let’s start with the basics. Jenkins is relatively simple to install, is a standalone Java-based application, and runs out of the box on almost all major operating systems, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux (as well as other Unix-based ones).

Configuration is another thing that seems easy with Jenkins. It can be configured via a standard, fairly modern web interface that includes all the tools a beginner would need, such as on-the-fly error checking and an extensive help section.

We mentioned before that Jenkins is known for its large number of plugins. You can choose the recommended options when you first install Jenkins, or you can handpick the tools that work best for you in your continuous integration and deployment pipelines.

Due to its plugin-based architecture, Jenkins is also significantly scalable (yes, you guessed it). This also means being able to work across multiple machines, as well as test and deploy projects across multiple platforms.

Notably, Jenkins supports some of the most popular version control systems, such as Subversion SVN, Git, GitHub, and Mercurial.

Due to its master-slave functionality, Jenkins is also highly scalable and supports the most popular deployment environments such as Docker, Amazon EC2, and Amazon S3.

Since Jenkins is a self-hosted server, you have full control over the project, source code, build environment, and deployment options.

Jenkins may not be perfect, but some of its shortcomings and potential annoyances are outweighed by the tool’s valuable features, stability, flexibility, and overall efficiency.

To recap, it’s very easy to install (no extra components required), configuration is done through a web-based GUI (very user-friendly), the plugin collection is generally seen as a godsend, and it’s platform-agnostic so it works on on all operating systems, and it is highly extensible (various features and options can be modified and extended).