Jenkins is the way to finally bring a retail giant into the 21st Century

Faster Integration Delivery

Submitted By Jenkins User John Pope

This UK-based grocery retailer wanted to put automation first and foremost, ensure that they respected bespoke systems, and kept the learning curve to a minimum. They did it all with Jenkins.

Organization: Sainsburys Supermarkets Ltd., <https://www.sainsburys.co.uk> **Industry:** Retail**Programming Language:** Java, Golang **Platform** : Docker or Kubernetes**Version Control System:** GitHub**Build Tool:** Maven**Community Support:** Jenkins.io websites & blogs, Spoke with colleagues and peers

The flexibility for Jenkins was -- and is -- critical to a large established retail organization.

Background: Our main challenges were as follows;

Automation first: There is no current automation from development to deployment. Moving to an automation-first principle, we wanted a pipeline that fit this need.
Bespoke needs: As a heavily bespoke internal/on-prem environment, with a number of 3rd party applications and integrated systems, we needed a development pipeline that provided the flexibility to 'fit' around these requirements as these are not going away anytime soon.
Minimize the learning curve: Yes, let's t-shape, but do it smart!
Future-proof: What gives us confidence that we can achieve this?
Faster and regular deployments: Go faster...but how?

Goals: Our main goal was to provide a consistent platform for internal shared services at Sainsburys. Solution & Results: We dealt with our objectives/challenges thus;

Automation First: We are already heavy users of GitHub, thus integration with that was a given need. Jenkins hooks into GitHub, meaning this was a quick win, with just a tiny amount of understanding of 'how,' there was no need for any tremendous upskilling -- meaning developers could keep on developing as they had been!
Bespoke Needs: We found that the Jenkins pipeline provided ease of integration with other services like AWS, ServiceNow, CheckMarx, MS. Teams/Slack, to name but a few, either using open source plugins or some custom groovy/bash script. Using this aspect of Jenkins meant we could achieve this need.
Keep the learning curve to a minimum: A few of us already had some Jenkins exposure in previous roles; using Jenkins meant that we were keeping a narrower tech scope than, say, if we were to use a managed service like that provided by AWS/Azure, thus minimizing any learning curve required for this. Plus, learnings are always shared.
Future proofing (well, as best as possible!): We were moving toward a microservices architecture. Jenkins already had a proven history in this tech. Once again, this was a really easy argument to win. Using Jenkins in/with K8s opens up a whole world of functionality and future-proofing for many years.
Go faster: With Jenkins? YES, OF COURSE, GO FASTER!!