To Create a Cluster or Not to Create a Cluster?

As I mentioned already, Jenkins X is much more than just a tool for continuous integration or continuous delivery. One of the many features it has is to create a fully operational Kubernetes cluster and install the tools we might need to operate it efficiently. On the other hand, jx allows us to install Jenkins X inside an existing Kubernetes cluster as well.

So, we need to make a choice.

Create a cluster using jx or install Jenkins in an existing cluster?

The decision will largely depend on your current situation, as well as the purpose of the cluster.

If you plan to create a cluster only for the purpose of the exercises in this course, I recommend using jx to create a cluster, assuming that your favorite hosting vendor is one of the supported ones. Another reason for letting jx handle the creation of the cluster lies in the potential desire to have a dedicated cluster for continuous delivery. In both cases, we can use the jx create cluster command.

On the other hand, you might already have a cluster where other applications are running and might want to add Jenkins X to it. In that case, all we have to do is install Jenkins X by executing jx install.

Let’s go through both the jx create cluster and jx install commands and see what we’ve got.

jx create cluster help

Let’s run the following command first: