Jenkins Pipelines 2.0: Boosting DevOps and Continuous Delivery in China

Preface

Zhang Le : DevOps has become a hot topic in recent years. From a community perspective we aim to make DevOps not only a concept but also a practical implementation, with pipelines being a key delivery mechanism.

Part 1 : Survey the current state of DevOps and continuous delivery pipelines in China. Part 2 : Demonstrate end‑to‑end pipeline solutions.

1. Continuous Delivery Status

In August this year a systematic framework of DevOps "Dao‑Fa‑Shu‑Qi" was released at DevOpsDays.

The survey covered a wide range of Chinese enterprises. Respondents from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and many other regions, including internet, finance, telecom and software companies, are actively practicing DevOps and pipelines.

Company size distribution: >1000 employees 43%, 100‑500 employees 30%.

65% of respondents can deploy at least once per week. Higher deployment frequency correlates with higher success rates.

64% have adopted continuous delivery pipelines; 86% of those use Jenkins.

1.1 Overview

The survey data shows broad adoption across industries and company sizes.

1.2 Pipeline Practice

Pipeline stages are divided into three phases: Commit, Test/Verification, and Deployment/Release.

Common practices: automated compilation, packaging, and branch development are mature; automated unit testing and exploratory testing are less widely adopted. Deployment practices such as gray releases and automated regression testing are also under‑utilized.

1.3 Tool Lifecycle

Key tools used: JIRA and Redmine for requirement management; GitLab, SVN, GitHub for source control; PMD, Checkstyle for code scanning; Harbor and Nexus for artifact management; Maven for builds.

Many advanced tools (e.g., distributed control centers, dynamic configuration, data change management, security tools) have low adoption rates, indicating opportunities for future improvement.

1.4 Jenkins Issues and Improvement Suggestions

Users report high integration complexity, insufficient enterprise‑grade features, and steep learning curves. Desired improvements include better documentation and faster URLs.

2. How to Implement an End‑to‑End Pipeline

The team released Pipeline 1.0 in April and has since evolved to Pipeline 2.0, addressing more complex enterprise scenarios.

Key goals:

1 Realistic enterprise scenarios (micro‑services, full lifecycle from requirement to release). 2 Integration of mainstream tools (GitLab, Maven, etc.). 3 Stronger pipeline value‑stream management with hierarchical pipelines.

A demo project “Sock Store” illustrates a multi‑language micro‑service architecture.

Workflow:

Requirements are managed in JIRA and linked to GitLab branches.

Code commits trigger personal‑level pipelines for automated build, test, and static analysis (e.g., Alibaba Java coding guidelines).

Successful builds proceed to team‑level verification pipelines and finally to deployment pipelines.

Deployment includes staged gray releases (first 10% of production, then full rollout) with continuous monitoring of KPI and latency.

Key Technical Highlights of Pipeline 2.0

Full containerization of build, test, deployment, and runtime environments using Docker‑in‑Docker.

Elastic dynamic clusters with unified resource scheduling.

Extensive integration of mainstream tools (JIRA, GitLab, Maven, Harbor, etc.) into the pipeline.

The end‑to‑end pipeline connects requirement, development, testing, and deployment, achieving high automation while still allowing manual intervention when necessary.