Jenkins vs Azure DevOps – What’s the Difference ? (Pros and Cons). There are development teams in every company that have to know about their project needs and the requirement for continuous integration and continuous delivery tools. The CI/CD is like building blocks of the project.
On one side we have Jenkins, an open source server written entirely in Java. It works to achieve a continuous integration process. Also allows you to perform a number of activities that take place in an automated manner.
The other tool is called Azure DevOps. Software as a service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft. Additionally Azure DevOps provide a comprehensive tool chain for deployment and development. But how do they differ?
In this article, we will introduce what a Jenkins server and Azure DevOps are. Then we will move on to a detailed explanation along with a comparison between them.
Let’s start with Jenkins vs Azure DevOps – What’s the Difference ? (Pros and Cons).
What is Jenkins?
Written in Java with important plugins to automate and provide you continuous pipelines as well as service and implementation is Jenkins. By making it easier for developers to work to improve the product through design changes. In addition Jenkins is also responsible for testing and building a software pipelines.
The automation tool is widely used around the world. Development process can be accelerated using Jenkins. You can develop, test and automat it at a fast pace.
For example, if your team is working on a project, Jenkins will constantly test the version of the project and show errors in the early stages of development. The reason for Jenkins’ popularity is to control the repetitive tasks that occur during your project development.
How does Jenkins work?
To operate on various platforms such as Windows, MacOS, Unix etc Jenkins server which is a server application need a web server such as Apache Tomcat. For you to create Jenkins pipelines you need to follow a series of steps. So the Jenkins Continuous Integration Pipeline toolkit is designed to host, compile, monitor and test code or code changes such as:
- Continuous Integration Server changes.
- Automation testing framework changes.
- Building tool changes.
Features of using Jenkins
- Jenkins is simple to set up and customize.
- Many plugins that give it a lot of versatility.
- Delivers code instantaneously.
- Generates a report after deployment.
- Highlights errors in code or tests, and detects and resolves various issues in near real time.
- ideal for integration because it’s all done automatically.
- Fantastic support community.
- Simple installation and configuration.
- Provides software infrastructure with Agile development with Docker collaboration.
- Open source availability.
- Server based security.
- A significant degree of extensibility.
Pros and cons of Jenkins
Pros
- Rich plugin ecosystem. A wide range of plugins makes Jenkins flexible and enables building, deploying and automating on different platforms.
- Issues are detected and resolved almost instantly. Leaving the software in a safe state for release at any time.
- Most of the integration work is automated. Therefore, there are fewer integration problems. This saves time and money over the life of the project.
- Platform independent. Jenkins is available for all different platforms and operating systems, be it OS X, Windows or Linux.
- User friendly. Easy to install and does not require additional installations or components.
- Easy to set up. Well Jenkins can be easily modified and extended. Instantly publishes code and generates test reports. Moreover Jenkins can be configured according to your continuous integration and continuous delivery needs.
Cons
- No collaboration features.
- Lack of analytics.
- Unpredictable costs.
- Have to maintain your infrastructure by yourself.
- Lots of plugins have a problem with the updating process.
- Dashboard of Jenkins is hard when you have many jobs to be executed.
- A change made by one developer is not visible to another developer on the team. Only administrators can access it. This makes tracking difficult in large projects.
- Not easy to install and configure.
What is a Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps is a software development as a service (SaaS). Ideal for designing jobs and collaboration with other teams. They work on developing code and building and delivering applications and software. Also they integrate with some of the most advanced tools on the market and are excellent choice for an enterprise DevOps toolkit.
Thanks to it it allows assemblies to build and improve things faster than regular software development methods. Moreover Azure DevOps also helps developers, project managers, and collaborators in software development by maintaining an inclusive culture and process.
What can Azure DevOps do?
Here with Azure DevOps it includes a set of services that cover the entire development lifecycle, these services are:
- Firstly Azure Repos: Leverage a private git repose hosted in the cloud.
- Secondly Azure Pipelines: A cloud independent CI/CD language, platform, and platform that supports containers or Kubernetes.
- Thirdly Azure Panels: Quick planning, work item tracking, visualization and reporting tools.
- Fourthly Azure Test Planning: Provides an integrated solution for exploratory testing and planning.
- Fifthly Azure Artefacts: Provides integrated package management and supports streaming Maven, npm, Python, and NuGet packages from public or private sources.
Features of using Azure DevOps
Pipeline templates – Foremost Azure DevOps provides pipeline templates that users can run using a locally hosted agent or an Azure agent hosted in the cloud. All can be customized as YAML templates according to project needs.
Stand alone installation – Can be installed on servers hosted in an on premises data center to achieve functionality similar to that available with Azure DevOps on Azure Cloud.
Fine grained access – Individual project settings within the organization can be customized according to project team requirements. Indeed even so fine grained access can be achieved through delegation policies here.
Organization – A single user can belong to multiple organizations and use any of them to store tools and code sets related to their applications. In addition organization owners can assign different roles and permissions to anyone in the organization as needed. Although organization owners can also change permissions related to Azure Active Directory and control billing aspects of the account.
Azure Boards & Repo – Basically Azure Dashboards help software development teams use the interactive and customizable tools they need to manage software projects. It has built in support for Agile, Scrum and Kanban software development processes. Also helps development teams create custom dashboards as needed. Azure Repo is a set of version control tools that development teams can use to manage their codebases. Version control systems are software that help developers track code changes over time.
Pros and cons of Azure DevOps
Pros
- The app is easy to install and set up in minutes.
- Azure Pipelines-creates pipelines on Azure Cloud Platform.
- Version Control System – secondly with Azure Pipelines it integrates with GitHub, Git, Bitbucket.
- Supports multiple languages like Java, Node, PHP, .NET and Python.
- Analyse your applications instantly with built in applications and cloud capabilities with Visual studio services.
- Supports lots of platforms and runs on multiple frameworks.
- Client or any other applications can run with it.
- High availability.
- Azure Boards.
- Bug tracking and Agile support.
- Establishes trust.
- Saves time and money.
Cons
- Lack of native support for telemetry of the runtime environment.
- Documents are not updated.
- Integration with non Microsoft is difficult.
- No support for YAML scripts in the publication process.
- Support only for VS Tests type tests with dynamic code analysis.
- Not built in secret management system.
- No built in safety analyser.
Jenkins vs Azure DevOps - Comparison
Plugins and Tasks
The built in connector, its tasks, and its extensions can be easily downloaded from Azure DevOps. So this Azure DevOps tool is faster to adapt. On the other hand, Jenkins is plugin rich and almost all the integration work is done automatically. Deploy Jenkins for complex workflows. Basically with Jenkins you have fewer integration problems.
Project Management Integrations
Here the Azure DevOps has a lot of benefits. For one all the major factors involved in a software release are in the one product, there is less requirement for integrations that need additional configuration. However, the second software, i.e. Jenkins, can be easily extended, changed and modified. Users of Jenkins can select from a number of plugins that correspond with the project management systems they use. With Azure Pipeline the use of Microsoft products is easy. When it comes to configuration changes of non Microsoft products that is difficult. Opposite is with Jenkins.
Platform, language and cloud platform
Group Tasks
Pipelines in Azure allow us to encapsulate a series of tasks already defined in the pipeline into a reusable task, just like any other task. While Jenkins are usually managed by a single user, allowing for issue tracking and accountability through code push.
YAML Interface
Using YAML in Azure Pipelines, we can configure CI/CD pipelines as code. But Jenkins pipelines do not have a YAML interface.
Easy support
As we know Jenkins is open source software. Additionally it is widely used. What’s more, it also has the support of a huge online community of agile teams. Much less support with Azure Devops is available.
Analytics
In Azure Pipelines, parameters such as execution speed and duration are provided at the end of each execution, while Jenkins does not provide any analysis of a comprehensive deployment cycle. There are additional components to solve this problem, but they are not enough.
Thank you for your time in reading Jenkins vs Azure DevOps – What’s the Difference ? (Pros and Cons).
Jenkins vs Azure DevOps – What’s the Difference ? Conclusion
To sum up both Azure DevOps and Jenkins have their pros and cons. In the it depends what allows your team to work to not just complete the task but may also lead to new and innovative ways of working.
All depends on the needs of the team or the project. We know Jenkins is more flexible for building complex workflows and Azure DevOps is more scalable. A few CI tools are sufficient for all the mentioned scenarios. If we decide to use both tools, we should know that Azure Pipelines supports integration with Jenkins.
Thanks’ a lot! I hope I have helped you with your concern.
