The State of Jenkins: 2016 Community Survey Results

Last fall, prior to Jenkins World, CloudBees conducted a community survey on behalf of the Jenkins project. We were grateful to receive over 1,200 responses — and thanks to this input, we gained some interesting insights into what Jenkins users are doing.

Based on the results, it’s safe to say that Jenkins is currently viewed as the number-one Continuous Integration (CI) server and is rapidly becoming the leading Continuous Delivery (CD) tool. Adoption of Jenkins 2, which introduced CD pipelines, clear visibility of delivery stages, and multiple usability enhancements has skyrocketed to nearly half the active user base. Once again, there was a lot of consistency in many findings from year-to-year. For example, the number of Jenkins users continues to increase, with 90% of survey respondents considering Jenkins mission-critical.

Here are some of the key findings.

• The overwhelming majority of respondents, 85% indicated that Jenkins usage had increased. Diving a little deeper, for organizations with more than 50 software projects, almost 30% used Jenkins in 2016 as compared to 16% in 2012.
• An astounding 46% of respondents were running Jenkins 2 eight months after its release. This matches December 2016 stats from Jenkins.io showing 55% of active installs are running Jenkins 2.
• Adoption of Jenkins Pipeline for Continuous Delivery (CD) is accelerating. Respondents who have adopted CD reported that 54% are using Pipeline.
• The push to production has stayed about the same from last year, 61% of respondents are deploying changes to production at least once per week.
• Linux is the platform of choice for builds, favored by 85% of respondents, along with 85% choosing Git as the favored source code repository.
• Half of the respondents are deploying applications directly to the cloud, with Amazon Web Services as the favored platform.

We want to thank everyone for completing the survey — and congrats to Iker Garcia for winning a free pass to Jenkins World 2017 and to Dave Leifer for winning the Amazon gift card.

See you at Jenkins World, August 28-31, in San Francisco, California! Register now for the largest Jenkins event on the planet in 2017 and get the Early Bird discount. The Call for Papers is open until March 5th, so submit a talk and share your Jenkins knowledge with the community.