Jenkins finds a new home on Microsoft Azure

Jenkins, the continuous integration and delivery solution that’s become a de facto standard for developers, is moving the back-end infrastructure for the open source version of the project to Microsoft Azure.

This change arrives shortly after the release of Jenkins 2.0, and it comes in anticipation of the extra demand that the product’s new features are expected to create.

In a post at the Microsoft Azure blog, Microsoft stated it will be hosting “a modern, robust development and delivery infrastructure on Linux and Java in the Azure cloud.”

The existing open source Jenkins infrastructure was created courtesy of donations by individuals and institutions. But it lacks the reliability and scalability that its creators need.

The new, centralized infrastructure will include the main Jenkins site, as well as the Jenkins build that manages it, and will offer both current-generation (Jenkins 2.0) and legacy versions.

The shift to Azure lays the groundwork to tackle Jenkins’s scalability issues. Jenkins’ developers are conscious of its problems at massive scale — thousands of jobs, hundreds of thousands of job executions —  but have maintained that only a small minority of current customers face such problems. They plan to address security and coding pipeline issues first, then work on scale in the near future, so it’s likely they wanted to get established on Azure and see how it worked as an environment before further developing such features.

Microsoft has supported Jenkins on Azure in the past, mainly by contributing to the broad array of Jenkins plug-ins (such as the Azure Storage Plugin). This team-up provides Jenkins with a degree of support it hasn’t enjoyed before, but it also benefits Microsoft — and not only by having a prestigious project associated with its cloud. It sends yet another signal that Azure is an environment for non-Microsoft and open source technologies to flourish — in this case, Linux, Java, and Jenkins itself.