and building the application. In this chapter, we will ex- plore the elements of Jenkins X; in Chapter 6, we will cover how to get started with Jenkins X. What is Jenkins X? Jenkins X is an open source project designed to help ac- celerate the creation of cloud native applications by hid- ing the complexities of Kubernetes for CI and CD services. It comes with all the automation capabilities required by developers so that they can focus on writing the applica- tion code. For example, Jenkins X automates releases with semantic versions and creates artifacts, Docker im- ages and helm charts. It also automatically promotes ver- sioned artifacts across the environment via GitOps. Jenkins X automates the processes by providing a wrap- per around Kubernetes. Jenkins X can leverage any source code and it doesn’t care if you are using a traditional mid- dleware. In other words, Jenkins X simply doesn't care what services are running under the covers. Jenkins X provides a platform that enables the developer to preview the environment. Team members can review changes be- fore they are committed into production. The result is that testing is performed throughout the development process. The architecture of Jenkins X allows it to work seamlessly with any third party cloud including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Red Hat OpenShift, or IBM Cloud. The importance of microservices The world of application development has moved from an era of writing large, monolithic applications to building applications made up of individual containerized micro- services. 54