Hacker News Reader

Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had a hard time adjusting to the AWS devops phenomenon. There is so much damn uninteresting configuration and button-pushing, rather than engineering, that I get bored with it. Yet I feel social pressures to get various AWS devops certifications to remain on top of things. Previously used Jenkins successfully for many years so I have devops experience, but there is something about EC2 instances, elastic beanstalk, load balancing, etc at AWS that just makes me want to retire (yet I still get tremendous joy from programming and designing).

View on HN

Get used to it. Engineers are expensive, so if they can be replaced with button pushers they will be. Learn to push the buttons if you want to stay in the industry. You'll protect your value as an engineer because an engineer who can push buttons is more valuable than an engineer and a button pusher (especially if the company can get away with not paying an increased salary for the increased responsibility, which they usually can).

How is Jenkins not button pushing?

And besides, AWS has a stable API and a set of CLI tools to actually manage everything in the cloud without button pushing.

I am 29 now. Used Jenkins about 5 years ago because I couldn't find a much better alternative for a single-developer workflow, but it's a glorious pile of buttons that has 0 consistency and/or an API.

It is indeed also a pile of buttons.

It has a much bigger API than you'd expect, have you even tried to use it? :-)

Yeah. Can you create a user via the API?

First of all, Jenkins was created in 2005, when REST was barely past the stage of being a gleam in Roy Fielding's eye. Yet, almost from the start, almost every page had an API (you'd add /api after the URL for its corresponding HTML page). With XML, JSON and Python (!) formats, with built-in search and filtering.

Secondly, to your point, there you go: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17716242/creating-user-i... I'm pretty sure that the reason there is no REST API for it is because you're supposed to be using your favorite back-end (LDAP, AD, etc.), with which Jenkins can integrate.

It's quite disingenuous to complain about the Jenkins APIs, there are a lot of them. They're not perfect or designed necessarily like something you'd design in 2020, but they are there.

We manage, install and configure Jenkins as code, without clicking buttons. You can fully automate jenkins activity and setup, from install to job creation, execution, plugin updates, config changes validation etc. Of course only power users will fully use Jenkins power.

Jenkins isn’t really worth the hassle today in my opinion - there are a bunch of new build tools that solve the problem better without all the garbage that comes with it.

And they also look better.

For god’s sake, you could even use GitLab today. What does Jenkins give you? What is there to defend?

For complex pipelines and code reuse (plugins, pipeline libraries, scripting) between projects, Jenkins offers more features for power users, and its maturity has been proven while GitLab CI still suffers from his young age. Other examples with the Cons at the end of this article : https://medium.com/sv-blog/migrating-from-jenkins-to-gitlab-... and https://stackoverflow.com/a/37430097/2309958 (and I can probably find a lot more :-) )

You can try out Microtica (https://microtica.com), a tool that abstracts the complex cloud setups and provides easy configurations from the UI, so you don't have to spend time on boring stuff and continue the engineering you love. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com