Tap into the power of slaves with Jenkins

by Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Cloudbees 

One of the key benefits of continuous integration servers is to be able to effectively utilize a large number of virtual computers, as they are becoming cheaper and more abundant. Doing this is becoming increasingly important as the expanding computing power clearly comes in the form of higher parallelism, not a faster computer.

In this talk, we first look at the basics of setting up Jenkins for a large number of slaves, then look at various techniques enabled by them, such as parallel testing, load testing with many load generating clients, and how to orchestrate those activities. I’ll highlight various plugins in Jenkins that are useful for this goal, and how they can be combined so that you can do the same on your Jenkins.