Learn Jenkins with online courses and programs
Jenkins is an open-source technology that helps software developers automate workflows. The continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environment can simplify tasks and increase productivity. Learn Jenkins with courses delivered through edX.
What is Jenkins?
Jenkins is an open-source server that automates the time-consuming tasks of building, testing, and deploying software. By helping developers streamline these traditionally tedious processes, Jenkins accelerates the development process, helps reduce error rates, and frees up developers’ time so they can focus on more high-level tasks.
Jenkins automations support continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) processes in DevOps projects. DevOps is an approach to software development that improves communication and collaboration between developers and IT operations. It uses Agile principles and automation to break the silos between the two teams and increase the speed and quality of their work.1 Here’s a breakdown of what CI and CD involve:
Continuous integration promotes incremental software improvements by allowing developers to integrate changes as often as possible. Automation tools like Jenkins facilitate this process by testing and validating each change before it's integrated into the main branch.2
Continuous delivery goes a step beyond continuous integration. In addition to automating building and testing, it also automates the deployment process. The approval for deployment can be done manually or automated. When this final decision is automated, the process is known as continuous deployment.3
DevOps teams adapt Jenkins to their projects by building custom pipelines. A pipeline is a set of automations that allow developers to build, test, and deploy code. Jenkins pipelines are made of different plugins that developers can combine to build automated workflows that suit each project’s needs.
Once developers build a pipeline, Jenkins will continuously track, build, and test any changes made to a project and alert developers of any errors. If the changes don’t contain any errors, Jenkins moves them to a staging environment where they remain ready for deployment. In cases where the pipeline is set up for both CI and CD, Jenkins will move changes all the way to the production environment.
Jenkins’s flexibility, stability, and high level of community support have made it one of the leading CI/CD tools.4 Because of this, Jenkins is a must-have in any back-end or DevOps developer’s tech stack.
Maximize Your Potential
Sign up for special offers, career resources, and recommendations that will help you grow, prepare, and advance in your career.
Browse online Jenkins Courses
Find new interests and advance your career opportunities
Stand out in your field
Use the knowledge and skills you have gained to drive impact at work and grow your career.
Learn at your own pace
On your computer, tablet or phone, online courses make learning flexible to fit your busy life.
Earn a valuable credential
Showcase your key skills and valuable knowledge.
Courses
Related Topics
What is covered in a Jenkins tutorial?
Because Jenkins is widely used in DevOps, taking a DevOps course can be a good start for beginners. Being able to understand the principles behind DevOps processes and the technologies that support them will help provide context when learning Jenkins.
A DevOps course may start by introducing learners to foundational aspects like containers, CI/CD, and site reliability engineering (SRE). They may then move into Jenkins basics, such as how to set up Jenkins servers and use plugins to Jenkins pipelines. Courses may also cover other aspects of the deployment process, including working with serverless architecture, setting up Kubernetes, and building Python functions.
edX offers a variety of learning options for those interested in using Jenkins training in a professional setting. For learners who already have DevOps experience, a Jenkins-specific course can provide additional skills to enhance their development workflows.
Jobs that use Jenkins
Jobs that use Jenkins can be found within the DevOps field. As you browse through open roles, you may find many positions that list Jenkins in their qualifications. Some common DevOps jobs that can require Jenkins experience include:
DevOps Engineer
AWS (Amazon Web Services) DevOps engineer
Azure DevOps engineer
Full-stack Java developer
Cloud engineer
CI/CD engineer
For entry-level DevOps positions, employers may seek out candidates with bachelor’s degrees in computer science, engineering, or IT. As an alternative to earning a degree, completing a DevOps course or boot camp can help you acquire many of the skills to become an attractive candidate for a DevOps role.
Experienced DevOps professionals can improve their chances of landing senior roles by obtaining a master’s degree in computer science, cybersecurity, engineering, or related fields.
How to get started with Jenkins
To understand how Jenkins integrates into the larger DevOps cycle, it can help to have a strong background in programming languages and tools. Because of this, professionals in DevOps roles will often have bachelor’s degrees in disciplines like computer science, software engineering, and IT management.5
In general, most Jenkins classes will guide learners through the following stages:
How to integrate Jenkins into the DevOps cycle
How to set up a Jenkins automation server
How to choose and install Jenkins plugins
How to build a Jenkins CI/CD pipeline
Aside from obtaining a bachelor’s degree, beginners can build a strong programming foundation by completing coding boot camps where they’ll learn the basics of client and server-side development. Experienced software developers and IT professionals looking to expand their stack can learn Jenkins either through a general DevOps course or a Jenkins-focused course.
More opportunities for you to learn
We've added 500+ learning opportunities to create one of the world's most comprehensive free-to-degree online learning platforms.
Frequently Asked Questions
DevOps Best Practices. (2022). Atlassian. Retrieved December 12, 2022.
What Is Continuous Delivery?. (2022). Amazon Web Services. Retrieved December 12, 2022.
DevOps Pipeline. (2022). Atlassian. Retrieved December 12, 2022.
2021 Team Tools Survey. (2021). JetBrains. Retrieved January 20, 2023.
Who is a DevOps engineer?. (2022). Red Hat. Retrieved December 12, 2022.