Automation Enabler

Background: Being a consultant to a corporate client, one in the financial services industry, means you must navigate processes that are fairly rigid. To hit our milestones and achieve successful outcomes, we needed to cobble together multiple technologies and API's into reproducible workflows.

Goals: To create an independent orchestration tool that would allow developers to build independently without relying on unnecessary resources and check-ins, and to shave time off of the development cycle.

Solution & Results: We used Jenkins to expose one API fronting a Jenkins workflow. We were able to develop workflows to allow developers and infrastructure resources to create the resources they needed without hitting the limitations of the downstream tools used. It also allowed us to meet the needs of the 3rd party RBAC requirements.

When working in corporate environments you face slow-moving teams or very rigid processes that take long times to change. Jenkins enabled us to abstract these pain points away from our customers. We were also able to create custom portals to front API access to Jenkins so the users never knew they were working via Jenkins. It was the secret engine underneath the hood.

Jenkins workflows and cross-platform compatibility were key for us. Being able to host individual steps in our workflow across Windows and Linux hosts allows us to leverage the OS tools we needed to build and deploy our resources.

Results were as follows:

• using Jenkins, we reduced the number of users needed to participate in complex workflows
• resources could be built immediately, or once approval had occurred
• the project timeline was pulled in by months due to the flexible processes that were created