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A big thanks to Rackspace

R. Tyler Croy
R. Tyler Croy
June 09, 2011

This post is long over-due and I really apologize for that.

Some months ago we put out the call for "more agent machines!" through the mailing lists, sky-writers and twitter. We had a serious problem, for a continuous integration project, a large number of our plugins and dependencies weren’t being built in a continuous and automated fashion!

We had some builds on a couple of flakey machines on home connections contributed by various individuals, until Rackspace stepped up in a big way and donated an infrastructure server for the project to use.

image:https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://agentdero.cachefly.net/continuousblog/rackspace.jpg

For months now, just about all plugins and core have been built and tested on spinach, the always-on machine in the Rackspace Cloud. Dutifully chugging away building core, plugin after plugin and occasionally getting flooded with work from Frederic Camblor’s plugin compatibility tester!

In hindsight, having a powerful infrastructure machine for nothing other than builds has helped us build great software faster; I can’t imagine how difficult things might be otherwise.

I’ve personally had a lot of interaction with Rackspace engineers through the OpenStack project and have a number of friends who operate businesses on Rackspace/Rackspace Cloud hybrid infrastructures.

The folks at Rackspace are top notch and I can’t thank them enough for contributing to the Jenkins project.

About the author

R. Tyler Croy

R. Tyler Croy

R. Tyler Croy has been part of the Jenkins project for the past seven years. While avoiding contributing any Java code, Tyler is involved in many of the other aspects of the project which keep it running, such as this website, infrastructure, governance, etc.