Hacker News Reader

Comment by kro92kfmrzz | Hacker News Reader

We’re currently replacing Jenkins with EKS, and if it goes well, will consider doing the same with Circle.

External partners have costs. And really the kind of things we need these things for here are pretty easy to configure in a Docker container.

What we expect we’ll end up with after the Jenkins switch is Cloudformation templates we can hack into a Circle CI replacement.

And we’d use GitLab if we could start over there but are bought into some end user tools and workflows that connect to GitHub that people don’t want to give up. BUT no one cares about Jenkins going away since they use it through a Slack bot ️

View on HN

> replacing Jenkins with EKS

This doesn't make sense to me. Jenkins is a CI tool - that means it can build, test, and deploy your code.

EKS is a managed Kubernetes instance. That means it can run a collection of Docker containers.

I don't see how EKS can accomplish building or testing.

Not the GP, but I suspect they may have been referring to replacing their use of Jenkins as a part-deployment, part-orchestration tool to administer lots of background jobs as a sort of a distributed cron. Many people use Jenkins thus, and in that domain Kubernetes does indeed compete along some axes.

Kubernetes orchestrates running jobs, giving them all required prerequisites and data in the form of Docker containers and can record or report logs, as well as store configuration and secrets. Jenkins orchestrates Jenkins agents running jobs on pre-configured servers, stores configuration and secrets, and records and archives logs and built files. They are both very similar from this perspective. There’s no reason Jenkins couldn’t attach a monitoring system to run a Jenkins job when a service goes down or exceeds capacity. And you probably would prefer storing secrets and files off your Jenkins server if your builds are distributed or you run out of space. Basically... Jenkins is an orchestration service but most people run short-lived tasks with it, and they have to worry about configuring and deploying Jenkins agent images separately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com