[quacker]

Biggest lesson for us: Avoid putting all your logic into Jenkins templates. You're not capturing your CI/deployment logic in version control, and this can cause problems down the road (we backed up Jenkins regularly, but versioning was a weak point).

Jenkins Job Builder[1] is a great tool that solves exactly this problem. You write job definitions in yaml/json files. Then, check these yaml files into version control and run JJB to push these jobs to your Jenkins server.

JJB is great because it's purely a client. It requires no extra Jenkins plugins. Since all of your jobs are now captured in version control, you can reproduce your Jenkins jobs instantly in a local docker container or vagrant machine to dev/test change to your Jenkins jobs.

I really recommend trying it out. No more manually clicking around in Jenkins to configure things.

1: http://docs.openstack.org/infra/jenkins-job-builder/