February 22, 2026
The kubernetes plugin gives Jenkins elastic build capacity. Each build spins up a pod, runs its work, and the pod is deleted. No idle agents, no capacity planning, no snowflake build servers.
The plugin creates agent pods on demand. When a pipeline requests an agent, a pod is created from a template, its JNLP container connects back to Jenkins, the build runs, and the pod is deleted.
February 21, 2026
A container build that takes eight minutes in CI is not just slow – it compounds across every push, every developer, every day. The difference between a naive Dockerfile and an optimized one is often the difference between a two-minute build and a twelve-minute build. The techniques here are not theoretical. They are the specific changes that eliminate wasted time.
BuildKit is the modern Docker build engine and the default since Docker 23.0. If you are running an older version, enable it explicitly with DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1. BuildKit provides several capabilities the legacy builder lacks.