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GSoC Project Intro: Jenkins Remoting over Message Bus/Queue

About me

My name is Pham Vu Tuan, I am a final year undergraduate student from Singapore. This is the first time I participate in Google Summer of Code and contribute to an open-source organization. I am very excited to contribute this summer.

Mentors

I have GSoC mentors who help me in this project Oleg Nenashev and Supun Wanniarachchi. Besides that, I also receive great support from developers in remoting project Devin Nusbaum and Jeff Thompson.

Overview

Current versions of Jenkins Remoting are based on the TCP protocol. If it fails, the agent connection and the build fails as well. There are also issues with traffic prioritization and multi-agent communications, which impact Jenkins stability and scalability.

This project aims to develop a plugin in order to add support of a popular message queue/bus technology (Kafka) as a fault-tolerant communication layer in Jenkins.

Why Kafka?

When planning for this project, we want to use traditional message queue system such as ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ. However, after some discussion, we decided to have a try with Kafka with more suitable features with this project:

• Kafka itself is not a queue like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ, it is a distributed, replicated commit log. This helps to remove message delivery complexity we have in traditional queue system.

• We need to support data streaming as a requirement, and Kafka is good at this aspect, which RabbitMQ is lack of.

• Kafka is said to have a better scalability and good support from the development community.

Current State

The project is reaching the end of the first phase and here are things we have achieved so far:

• Setup project as a set of Docker Compose components: Kafka cluster, Jenkins master (with plugin) and a custom agent (JAR).

• Create a PoC with new command transport implementation to support Kafka, which involves of command invocation, RMI, classloading and data streaming.

• Make neccessary changes in Remoting and Jenkins core to make them extensible for the use of this project.

• Decide to use Kafka as a suitable final implementation.

We planned to release an alpha version of this plugin by the end of this phase, but decided to move this release to the second phase because we need to wait for remoting and core patches to be released.

Architecture Overview

The project consists of multiple components:

• Kafka Client Library - new command transport implementation, producer and consumer client logic.

• Remoting Kafka Plugin - plugin implementation with KafkaGlobalConfiguration and KafkaComputerLauncher.

• Remoting Kafka Agent - A custom JAR agent with remoting JAR packaged together with a custom Engine implementation to setup a communication channel with Kafka.

• All the components are packaged together with Docker Compose.

The below diagram is the overview of the current architecture:

With this design, master is not communicating with agent using direct TCP communication anymore, all the communication commands are transfered with Kafka.

Features

1. Kafka Global Configuration

2. Custom agent start up as a JAR

User can start running an agent with the following command:

3. Launch agents with Kafka

4. Commands transferred between master and agent over Kafka

Remoting operations are being executed over Kafka. In the log you may see:

• Command execution (SlaveInstallerFactoryImpl.isWindows())

• Classloading (Classloader.fetch())

• Log streaming (Pipe.chunk())

5. Run jobs with remoting Kafka

It is possible to run jobs on Agents connected over Kafka

Next Phase Plan

Here are the tasks planned for the next phase:

• Support security for master-agent connection:

  • Kafka authentication/authorization (JENKINS-51472, JENKINS-51473).

  • Agent secrets (JENKINS-51470).

• Improve Kafka producer-consumer model to ensure reliability (JENKINS-51942).

• Bug fixing.

• Release alpha version and address feedback (JENKINS-51713).

How to run demo

You can try to run a demo of the plugin by following the instruction.

Links

• 

• GitHub Repository

• Project Page

• Phase 1 Presentation Video

• Phase 1 Presentation Slides

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What is a UV Filter and Do You Need it to Protect Your Camera Lens?

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How to Automatically Enable Windows 10’s Dark Theme at Night

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Running Jenkins with Java 10 and 11 (experimental support)

As you probably know, we will have a Jenkins and Java 10+ online hackathon this week. In order to enable early adopters to try out Jenkins with new Java versions, we have updated Jenkins core and Docker packages. Starting from Jenkins 2.127, weekly releases can be launched with Java 10 and Java 11 (preview). Although there are some known compatibility issues, the packages are ready for evaluation and exploratory testing.

This article explains how to run Jenkins with Java 10 and 11 using Docker images and WAR files. It also lists known issues and provides contributor guidelines.

Running in Docker

In order to simplify testing, we have created a new jenkins/jenkins-experimental repository on DockerHub. This repository includes various Jenkins Core images, including Java 10 and Java 11 images. We have also set up development branches and continuous delivery flows for Jenkins core, so now we can deliver patches for these images without waiting for weekly releases.

You can run the image simply as:

docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 50000:50000 jenkins/jenkins-experimental:latest-jdk10

The following tags are available:

• 2.127-jdk10, 2.127-jdk11 - Weekly releases packaged with Java 10 and 11

• latest-jdk10 - Jenkins core build from the java10-support branch

• latest-jdk11 - Automatic build from the core’s java11-support branch.

Java 10/11 images are fully compatible with the official jenkins/jenkins Docker image documentation, e.g. you can use plugins.txt to install plugins, mount volumes and pass extra options via environment variables.

Running Jenkins without Docker

Java 10

1. Download Jenkins WAR for 2.127 or above (or build the experimental branch)

2. Run WAR with the following command:

${JAVA10_HOME}/bin/java --add-modules java.xml.bind -jar jenkins.war \
    --enable-future-java --httpPort=8080 --prefix=/jenkins

Java 11

1. Download Jenkins WAR for 2.127 or above (or build the experimental branch)

2. Download the following libraries to the same directory as jenkins.war

   • jaxb-api-2.3.0.jar (save as jaxb-api.jar)

   • jaxb-core-2.3.0.1.jar (save as jaxb-core.jar)

   • jaxb-impl-2.3.0.1.jar (save as jaxb-impl.jar)

   • javax.activation v.1.2.0 (save as javax.activation.jar)

3. Run the following command:

Run Jenkins with ${JAVA11_HOME}/bin/java \
    -p jaxb-api.jar:javax.activation.jar --add-modules java.xml.bind,java.activation \
    -cp jaxb-core.jar:jaxb-impl.jar \
    -jar jenkins.war --enable-future-java --httpPort=8080 --prefix=/jenkins

Current state

As of June 17, we have achieved the following state:

• Jenkins 2.127+ starts up successfully with OpenJDK 10.0.1 and OpenJDK 11+17-Debian-2 (preview)

• It is possible to configure and run simple Freestyle jobs

• Jenkins agents are able to start on Java 10, to connect to the master and to execute Freestyle jobs

• Agents can be connected using Docker Plugin and Yet Another Docker Plugin

• Job DSL plugin works well on demo projects

• Maven Integration plugin can build plugin-pom-based Jenkins plugins when running on agents with JDK 8

• It is possible to create Folders and manage items in them

• It is possible to configure Jenkins using Configuration-as-Code plugin

• Jenkins is able to execute Groovy scripts in Script Console and Groovy Hooks

Known issues

So far we know about the following issues:

• Pipeline crashes immediately on Java 10 and 11 (JENKINS-46602)

• Git Client plugin 2.7.2 cannot be installed with Java 11, 3.0.0-beta3 from Experimental Update Center is required (JENKINS-51871)

• There are many warnings about Illegal reflective access during execution (linked in JENKINS-40689).

  • In current Java 10 and 11 releases it does not lead to failures, but we want to cleanup these warnings anyway

• Configuration-as-Code plugin fails to export configurations on Java 10 (JENKINS-51991)

We anticipate to discover and report more issues during the hackathon this week.

Contributing

If you discover incompatibilities in plugins, please report issues in our bugtracker. We have java10 and java11 labels for such issues.

If you are interested to try out Jenkins with Java 10 and 11 before June 22nd, you may be interested to sign-up to the Jenkins and Java 10+ online hackathon. Everybody is welcome to join, independently of their Jenkins experience and amount of time they have available. Exploratory testing is also within the hackathon’s scope. During this event, please also use the java10_hackathon label. It will help us to track contributions and send folks some small "thank you" gifts for participating (details will be figured out during the hackathon).

If you want to contribute patches to the core, please submit pull requests to java10-support or java11-support branches. If the patches are compatible with Java 8, we will try to upstream them to weekly releases. For plugin patches please create pull requests against main branches and then follow guidelines from plugin maintainers. If you need additional reviews and you are a member of the jenkinsci organization, feel free to mention the @jenkinsci/java10-support team in your PRs.

Links:

• Docker: jenkins/jenkins-experimental images

• JIRA: Java 10 compatibility

• JIRA: Java 11 compatibility

• Jenkins and Java 10+ online hackathon

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