In Jenkins CI: The Origins of Butlers, Build Masters and Bowties, we looks at all the angles in Jenkins, covering some history, our favorite features & plugins and even show you how to build Jenkins pipelines the ZeroTurnaround way–plus, we have top it all off with an exclusive interview with our friend Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the originator of Jenkins. Here’s what we got in store for you:

• Part I – Intro, history, timeline, the break between Jenkins & Hudson
• Part II – ZeroTurnaround’s favorite Jenkins features and top 15 favorite plugins, common pitfalls when getting started
• Part III – How Developers, QA/Testers, Infrastructure Engineers and Project Managers utilize Jenkins
• Part IV – How ZeroTurnaround uses Jenkins to build and release JRebel and LiveRebel (building pipelines in 8 steps)
• Part V – *Exclusive interview with Kohsuke Kawaguchi, creator of Jenkins

Sign up to get the full report: http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/devs/jenkins-ci-the-origins-of-butlers-build-masters-and-bowties/

This is a huge report filled with info for beginners just getting started with Jenkins as well as pros who want to see how the team that makes JRebel and LiveRebel use Jenkins in house. The interview wiht Kohsuke is a nice finish. It's clear a lot of hard work went into this!

Love the KK interview - nice exclusive!

Would be good to know more about ther other competitors to Jenkins like Bamboo or TeamCity.  They seem feature rich also, so why is there such a strong following for Jenkins? What distinguishes it from it's main competitors? 

Because Jenkins (Hudson) was first* (like before TeamCity, Bamboo), free, had nice UI, cool features like distributed builds and worked out of the box. KK being nice guy helped as well and lo and behold - thriving community 'happened' in the way and CI concepts got pupularized.

I have my own issues with Jenkins. UI need serious overhaul IMO and it would be nice to get some kind of a template/hierarchical plugin. I know that CloudBees has something like that but I'm (my employee) not interested in their hosted solutions. Anyway, kudos to KK and anyone who contributed to Hudson/Jenkins.

Comparison with other solutions would be nice, thoough ;-)

* I know that Hudson wasn't the first known CI solution, but when I was introducing CI to my-then employee I coudn't find any serious noncommercial competitor. Cruise Control was rather rudimentary and IIRC lacked UI.

Sorry, but the first one was Cruise Control, and it is still around :)

Just for the sake of clarity, it seems Hudson was started in February 2005 (http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kohsuke/archive/2005/02/make_your_build.html), not sure when the first usable version was released.

At about the same time we started working on TeamCity, and it's first version was released on October 2, 2006, 7 years ago (http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2006/10/double-volley-intellij-idea-60-and-teamcity-10/).

The first version of Bamboo was released in the beginning of 2007 (http://blogs.atlassian.com/2007/02/bamboo_10_ci_se/).

I did mention CC ;-)

BTW, from what I've seen TC looks nice, but I think that TC+YT could be even more interesting combo. Unfortunately (or not) my current employee is married to Attlasian solutions (Jira, Confluence) and since Jenkins just works...

Love IntelliJ Idea anyway.

I'm sure somebody will one up me also.  But AntHillPro was around in 2001.