Multiple Jenkins Masters using a Shared Slave pool

Question

I am trying to scale Jenkins for a large organization. Is there a way to have multiple Jenkins masters share a slave pool? For example, if I had 200 Jenkins Masters and I want t

Answer 1

As you've noted it's not hard to share slaves between masters, just setup multiple workspaces and each master will install it's own slave jar. The trick is to share resources properly.

One such resource manager is Apache Mesos. A Jenkins Mesos plugin exists enabling the creation of slaves on a managed cluster.

This approach is very new and Ebay have blogged on how they've evolved their Jenkins setup to use Mesos:

• Ebay CI solutin part 1
• Ebay CI solution part 2

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

There is a Gearman Plugin developed by Open Stack to handle sharing slaves by multiple masters.

Answer 3

If it were me, I'd set up all the masters with a cloud plugin for slaves. For example, you could install the kubernetes plugin or the nomad plugin and connect all masters up to the same kubernetes or nomad cluster. Nomad or Kubernetes would take care of resource management, and the masters would only be submitting jobs to a shared pool of resources. This concept can easily be applied to other cloud providers, like AWS, but IMHO if you just want to set up an on-prem pool of resources for your jenkins masters from scratch, nomad is the easiest option.