Is Your Cluster Ready for Jenkins X?

If you're reading this, chances are that you do not want to use jx cluster create to create a new cluster that will host Jenkins X. That is OK, and even welcome. That likely means that you are already experienced with Kubernetes and that you already have applications running in Kubernetes. That's a sign of maturity and your desire to add Jenkins X to the mix of whichever applications you are already running there. After all, it would be silly to create a new cluster for each set of applications.

However, using an existing Kubernetes cluster is risky. Some people assume that it will be easy to create a cluster from scratch. "We're so awesome that we don't need tools like Rancher to create a cluster for us. We'll do it with kubeadm." Then, after a lot of sweat, we announce that the cluster is operational, only to discover that there is no StorageClass or that networking does not work. So, if you assembled your own cluster and you want to use Jenkins X inside it, you need to ask yourself whether that cluster is set up correctly. Does it have everything we need? Does it comply with standards, or did you tweak it to meet your corporate restrictions? Did you choose to remove StorageClass because all your applications are stateless? Were you forced by your security department to restrict communication between Namespaces? Is the Kubernetes version too old? We can answer those and many other questions by running compliance tests.