Jenkins Templating Engine
The Jenkins Templating Engine (JTE) is a plugin developed by Booz Allen Hamilton enabling pipeline templating and governance. JTE allows you to consolidate pipelines into shareable workflows that define the business logic of your software delivery processes while allowing for optimal pipeline code reuse by pulling out tool specific implementations into library modules.
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We recommend you watch the recent Jenkins Online Meetup or read Introducing the Jenkins Templating Engine as a starting point to get a feel for what JTE can do for your pipeline development! |
How Does It Work?
The Jenkins Templating Engine works off the idea of pipeline templates that define generically what should happen (and when) and accompanying configuration files that populate the template with implementation details.
Why Templating?
Pipelines are typically defined on a per application basis via a Jenkinsfile in the source code repository. Often, common code can be pulled out into Shared Libraries to reduce code duplication but a few problems remain.
Organization’s application portfolios often have a diverse technology stack, each requiring their own pipeline-as-code integrations. It becomes increasingly complex to manage these different implementations across an organization while standardizing on the required software delivery processes. For organizations with strict governance requirements having a Jenkinsfile within the source code repository can allow developers to bypass these mandatory requirements.
Organizational Governance
The real power of JTE comes from creating shareable workflows and using them across teams. JTE allows you to create a centralized hierarchical governance for your pipeline configurations that aligns to your organizational structure. With governance tiers, organizations can accelerate enterprise adoption by creating inheritable pipelines that share common configurations.
Optimize Code Reuse
JTE allows you to share pipeline code effectively across multiple teams through the use of common pipeline libraries.
Simplify Pipeline Maintainability
When supporting pipelines for multiple applications it becomes more challenging to maintain the associated complexity. Multiple tech stacks and tool integrations can lead to largely similar Jenkinsfiles with distinct differences around how specific parts of the pipeline function.
JTE embraces the traditional software development practices of modularity and separation of concerns to create a more organized code base for your pipelines.
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At Booz Allen, we created the Jenkins Templating Engine to support our Solutions Delivery Platform; a DevSecOps platform accelerating adoption of modern software development best practices. |