Is Jenkins Dead? No, And That's Much Worse

Jenkins never said no. That was the whole problem. This is the story of how a young Sun Microsystems engineer named Kohsuke Kawaguchi built a simple automation tool in 2004 to stop breaking his team's builds — and accidentally created one of the most deeply embedded pieces of infrastructure in the software industry. Named Hudson, then renamed Jenkins after Oracle claimed the trademark, it grew from a weekend project into a system running inside banks, telecoms, and regulated industries worldwide, held together by eighteen hundred plugins written by thousands of people who mostly never met each other. But winning everything turned out to be its own kind of trap. Jenkins never refused a task, so companies handed it everything — deployments, backups, certificate renewals, financial reports, scripts that haven't been looked at since 2014. It became the most privileged machine in the building, holding every key, understood by exactly one person, and impossible to switch off without first finding out what it does. Every attempt to modernize it — Pipeline, Blue Ocean, Configuration as Code — could only be added on top, never rebuilt underneath. The world moved to GitHub Actions and cloud-native CI, and companies bought those too, and kept Jenkins as well. Tonight, somewhere, it is still running at two in the morning. Nobody touching it. Nobody thanked it. The phone is about to ring. #JenkinsCI #DevOpsHistory #ContinuousIntegration ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Sponsor: Infisical 🔗 https://infisical.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=devops_toolkit_review_ai_written_code ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Consider joining the channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/devopstoolkit/join ▬▬▬▬▬▬ 🔗 Additional Info 🔗 ▬▬▬▬▬▬ 🔗 Jenkins: https://jenkins.io ➡ Transcript and commands: https://devopstoolkit.live/bedtime/is-jenkins-dead-no-and-thats-much-worse ▬▬▬▬▬▬ 💰 Sponsorships 💰 ▬▬▬▬▬▬ If you are interested in sponsoring this channel, please visit https://devopstoolkit.live/sponsor for more information. Alternatively, feel free to contact me over Twitter or LinkedIn (see below). ▬▬▬▬▬▬ 👋 Contact me 👋 ▬▬▬▬▬▬ ➡ BlueSky: https://vfarcic.bsky.social ➡ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viktorfarcic/ ▬▬▬▬▬▬ 🚀 Other Channels 🚀 ▬▬▬▬▬▬ 🎤 Podcast: https://www.devopsparadox.com/ 💬 Live streams: https://www.youtube.com/c/DevOpsParadox ▬▬▬▬▬▬ ⏱ Timecodes ⏱ ▬▬▬▬▬▬ 00:00 Jenkins CI 01:16 Infisical (sponsor) 02:32 Kohsuke Kawaguchi & Hudson — The Boy Who Kept Breaking Things 05:27 Hudson Takes Over — The Butler Who Never Slept 08:13 Oracle and the Jenkins Fork — The Night They Took His Name 11:37 Jenkins Plugins — Two Thousand Hands 14:23 Pipeline, Blue Ocean and Jenkins X — The Vacuum in the Cupboard 18:24 Jenkins Today — The Script Under the Desk 20:20 Goodnight