We have a high performing and resource intensive pipeline that requires builds to be run multiple agents in parallel, for our requirements, we need at least 36 agents that will run our builds at the same time without waiting on the queue for one build to complete before another. We want the VMs to be spined up on demand when the pipeline is triggered and gets deleted when build is completed running. Is there any Jenkins plugin that can achieve this task?
Microsoft will stop supporting this plugin as from February 2024, is there any reason to be worried if we adopt the plugin or is there any alternative plugin to use.?
Yes, there are many different plugins that can complete that task. There are cloud plugins for most major cloud providers, including:
AWS
Azure
Google Cloud
Oracle Cloud
Hetzner Cloud
IBM Cloud
Alibaba Cloud
VMWare vSphere
I don’t think there is any reason to be worried about using that plugin. The Jenkins project uses it for ci.jenkins.io. Your use sounds like it will be significantly less than some of the heavy loads we’ve run on ci.jenkins.io.
The message on the plugins site says:
This plug-in is maintained by the Jenkins community and won’t be supported by Microsoft as of February 29, 2024.
The first part of that sentence is important. The Jenkins community already maintains that plugin. Microsoft’s business decision to not contribute their help to maintain and enhance the plugin does not stop the Jenkins community from maintaining it.
The Azure VM agents plugin is used on ci.jenkins.io and runs many concurrent agents on Azure as needed. One of the current maintainers is the Jenkins release officer, Tim Jacomb. The health score of the Azure VM agents plugin is currently 100/100. The plugin is in good hands and is well maintained.
You are welcome to provide additional help and improvements for the plugin.