I’m sitting here watching the braintrust in our IT organization tell everyone about a NEW! “PRO!” product that will do database migrations with Jenkins, and I’m just sitting over here thinking about the native migrations available by default in Ruby on Rails since version 1.0, which I’ve been enjoying for the past 15 years. I’ve deployed Rails apps with Jenkins, but I still like Capistrano better, because it’s “native.” I’ve yet to fool with their new Docker-based deployment tool because cap works so well.
They showed a script to call the Jenkins API to do deployment jobs. Again, I’m just sitting here wondering what in the world they’re talking about. Jenkins literally does all of this for you. They seem to think that Jenkins can’t handle deploying to separate environments, and therefore you need to script it so that you can parameterize the deployment with tags that live in git. I haven’t used Jenkins for 1o years, but — without even looking — I’d bet my eye teeth that Jenkins can do this without needing a script to call its API.
They’re signing off their dog and pony by looking for volunteers to demonstrate new things in this space. I think they’d barf if I demonstrated my workflow with Rails and Capistrano, and by so doing, illuminated how much time, effort, and money is wasted on a default stack using Java, React, and Oracle. It doesn’t use any sort of middleware, and therefore doesn’t have any steps to sit and wait for rubber stamp approvals by useless middle managers who aren’t going to actually review the changes, so I’m sure it would go over like a lead balloon.