The latest PassS support offering from Cloudbees, which promises to provide 24x7 'Global Technical Support' and all of the other bells and whistles that goes along with a standard support contract, sadly glosses over what real enterprise developers are interested in: the tools that can make a Jenkins infrastructure manageable.
Scrapped off their website, here's just a handful of the various plugins that are intended to make the life of the Jenkins administrator easier. If Cloudbees is interested in garnering the attention of the Java development community, it's these little nuggets of gold that they should be promoting:
Large Install Plugins
This group of plugins helps administrators manage large numbers of jobs, projects and teams. The plugins that help with large installation problems are:
- Folders Plugin
Folders help to create hierarchies or custom taxonomies to better manage large numbers of jobs - Templates Plugin
Capture “sameness” of configuration information in one place that is propogated - Backup Scheduling Plugin
Use Jenkins to backup Jenkins. No more cron jobs or error-prone custom scripts
Security Plugins
Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees helps administrators secure their projects and/or installations with the following plugins:
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Plugin
Setup sophisticated authorization policies to manage Jenkins - WikiText Descriptions Plugin
Prevent potential XSS attacks due to HTML descriptions in Jenkins
Optimized Utilization Plugins
Jenkins administrators can make better use of existing resources, greatly improving build times and reducing costs, with these plugins:
- VMware ESXi/vSphere Auto-Scaling Plugin
Better leverage existing VMware resources by using machines in VMware pools as slaves - Label Throttled Build Execution Plugin
Define the bare-metal limits for VMs being used as slaves. This helps in faster runs when multiple builds are running multiple VMs on a single bare-metal machine - Even Load Strategy Plugin
Change the default slave allocation algorithm of Jenkins to allocate jobs to free machines - Skip Next Build Plugin
Stop running builds for a specified period of time (usually if there are known errors that are being fixed)