I attended a Jenkins Meetup a while back and saw how the engineering team of a local company leveraged Jenkins pipelines and microservices architecture to simplify their build pipelines. It’s obvious to me that they have everything figured out, the Jenkins infrastructure is all set up and things are running well. I asked myself, what could Azure bring to the table?
Scaling out to Azure using Azure Container Agent, the Azure Container Instances (ACI) is ideal for transient workload like spinning up a container agent to run your build, test, and push the build artifacts to say Azure storage. You have an economical way to scale out without the burden of provisioning and managing the infrastructure. ACI also provides per second billing based on the capacity you need. Since spinning up an ACI agent is easy and fast, when your build is complete, just tear the agent down. You do not need to pay for any idle time.
And with Docker, you can create the build environment you need on demand. There is no need to update or patch servers, freeing up resouces from maintaining and upgrading your build agents.
If by now you are curious and wonder if you can move part of your build workload to the cloud, check out the step-by-step tutorial:
Leave us feedback on the pages if you have questions or any requests. We are listening.
Also, if you are wondering about AKS (Managed Kubernetes), we just added the support to our Azure Container Agent as well as to the plugin for deploying to Kubernetes on Azure.