Blog
August 9, 2023
In the fast-paced world of DevOps, speed, quality, and efficiency are paramount. As a result, Application Development and IT Operations teams constantly seek ways to streamline their processes and improve testing performance. To achieve this, Delphix has introduced an enhancement to its DevOps Data Platform: the Delphix Plugin for Jenkins. This plugin promises to revolutionize CI/CD pipelines, providing significant improvements for engineers, testers, and administrators through the streamlined accessibility of test data. In this blog post, we will explore the key features and drill into how this plugin empowers organizations to achieve greater efficiency, productivity, and agility in their development workflows.
Why Include Data in Your Jenkins Jobs?
We have seen the following benefits when integrating Delphix within Jenkins workflows:
- Streamline Development Processes - Due to Jenkins’ flexible pipeline design, application teams can orchestrate complex operations directly and simply within their existing pipelines. Previously to achieve the same outcome, engineers would interrupt their focus, switch to a new tool, and request a lengthy, manual IT ticket. Now, developers and testers can stay focused on their core assignments all within the comfort of their existing developer workspace.
- Accelerate Testing and Bug Resolution - Having fresh and compliant data at one's fingers tips is often the biggest challenge to improve application quality. You cannot test what you cannot replicate. By integrating Delphix within Jenkins, this is no longer a problem. Now application teams always have access to compliant and production-like data to help triage issues quickly and fix them more accurately, resulting in shorter SLAs.
- Improve Team Scalability - DevOps or product teams often look to automate the most repetitive, manual tasks and provide that capability through an as-a-service model. These models allow organizations to do more with less and keep costs low. Less time spent on manual tasks means more time devoted to value-generating activities, such as new features, bug fixes, or personal development.
- Easy Longterm Maintainability - The Jenkins ecosystem has a long list of 3rd party integrations that make advanced CI/CD construction a breeze. Traditionally, organizations achieved similar functionality through custom Shell scripting. This creates a huge burden on the team to maintain this code without an outlet for vendor assistance. Now combine Delphix’s and the 1800+ other plugins to replace any heavy, customized code. In addition, the Delphix Plugin is backed by the standard Delphix Support Agreement, so you can always reach out if you run into an issue.
How It Works
We built the Delphix plugin to replace heavy, manual data tasks or slot in seamlessly within your existing Jenkins pipelines. If your teams follow a strict IT ticketing process, we recommend constructing new Jenkins pipeline jobs to provision data from a finite set of options. This process is perfect for teams wanting a controlled “as-a-service” model. Afterward, instead of waiting for manual tickets, application teams can resolve data requests themselves. Such as with our ServiceNow Spoke, customers have successfully replaced many manual processes, freed up hours of their day, and improved testing efficiency.
Lastly, many automated scenarios leverage noncompliant, incomplete, or stale data. With our new plugin, product teams can replace their static data with fresh, masked copies from production using our plug-and-play data steps. With Delphix and Jenkins, squads integrate their testing automation suite with Delphix’s latest data to naturally increase testing proficiency without damaging standardized workflows.
Are you interested in getting started? Then check out the Delphix Plugin’s Jenkins page to learn, install, and try it yourself. Otherwise, if you prefer a helping hand, please contact us to see a complete Jenkins and Delphix DevOps Data Platform demo and identify the value it will bring to your organization.