CloudBees CI on traditional platforms is designed to support any organization’s CI/CD needs - regardless of whether they’re a single team with simple delivery pipelines or a massive, multi-national corporation with complex A/B deployments.
CloudBees CI on traditional platforms enables administrators to offer an internally managed CD as a Service to their teams. With CloudBees CI on traditional platforms, administrators centrally manage their organization’s build cluster using managed controllers and templates for build agents.
Agents are computers that handle the tasks of running builds in a CloudBees CI on traditional platforms cluster, and within the context of a CloudBees CI on traditional platforms cluster, they are shared resources for connected controllers.
By adding capacity, administrators can support additional managed controllers, Jenkins agents, or improve cluster performance and resiliency.
This guide assumes that administrators and organizations have completed an initial technical engagement with CloudBees experts to install and perform basic configurations to the CloudBees CI on traditional platforms cluster. This guide is meant to enable administrators interested in customizing some configurations, scaling their cluster, on-boarding new teams, or simply learning more about CloudBees CI’s architecture.
| Also be sure to secure your CloudBees CI instance. |
Components
CloudBees CI has two components - the client controller and the operations center. The client controller is a controller, whose main function is to coordinate the building of projects such as Pipelines.
When a CloudBees CI installation consists of two or more client controllers, it is usually a good idea to install an operations center instance to manage these client controllers. The operations center provides centralized management for the following key features of a client controller:
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Security and role-based access controls, which controls access to different client controllers, as well as various Pipeline projects and jobs on each client controller.
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Credentials, typically used to access secured external resources in Pipeline projects and jobs.
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Agents, which can be shared amongst different client controllers.
The operations center also provides other management features for client controllers.
Concepts
Traditionally, the Jenkins user interface (UI) has concentrated on build jobs as the primary top level items within Jenkins. A number of CloudBees plugins have extended the model somewhat, e.g. the Folders plugin introduced folders as a container top level item, the CloudBees update center plugin introduced hosted Jenkins update centers as a top level item.
The operations center introduces some additional top level items. This section details the top level items and other concepts that are used in operations center.
- Operations center server
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The operations center is a special type of Jenkins instance that acts as the central authority in an operations center cluster.
- Client controller
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A CloudBees CI controller, which can be joined to the operations center cluster.
- Shared agent
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Shared agents are special resources created on the operations center server that can be leased out to client controllers on demand to provide build resources.
- Shared cloud
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In addition to shared agents, cloud providers can be used to provision temporary shared agents when demand exceeds that available from the shared agents.
- Folders
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The folders plugin provides a key top level item used for scoping the availability of resources. For example,
credentials/shared agents/shared clouds/etcdefined within a folder will only be available to items within the folder or contained sub-folders. - Sub-licensing
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Each standalone controller must have a valid license in order to use CloudBees CI’s features. A license for operations center includes the capability to generate sub-licenses for the client controllers that form part of the operations center cluster.