Hi,
To answer the question about Jenkins documentation: General Apache
Jenkins info: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/Jenkins
Our "normal" Jenkins jobs that (a) build/publish the website on
commits and (b) push nightly controller/invoker images to dockerhub for use
by our CI process does not need OpenWhisk-specific VMs. They are running
on vanilla "website" and "ubuntu" Jenkins worker nodes shared by all
projects and provided by Infra. The shared nodes are adequate for our
these two jobs.
We had dedicated nodes that were functional for a short period (a few
months) to do multi-node testing of PRs for the core repo. This was
triggered by a Jenkins job, but the real work was done via an ansible
deploy/test, so it probably wasn't obvious at the Jenkins level that the
machines were being utilized. This was not a very reliable setup.
Vincent did document the setup in our cwiki (eg
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OPENWHISK/How+to+maintain+the
+Jenkins+pipeline+for+OpenWhisk), but I would not suggest attempting to
duplicate this on the new ci-builds.a.o Jenkins service.
My opinion is that we don't really need dedicated Jenkins nodes. If
we wanted dedicated VMs for testing, we should instead be configuring them
as a Kubernetes cluster and doing multi-node testing via a Kubernetes
deployment of OpenWhisk onto those nodes. I don't think investing in
ansible-based distributed deploy/testing is worth the effort. This could
be driven by a Jenkins job (which should be able to run on a non-dedicated
node as it is doing very little actual work), but it does not need the
Kubernetes cluster to actually be made from Jenkins worker nodes.
--dave
