About 12 years ago, we used a piece of software called Hudson to automate various tasks that were otherwise run by hand. Things like running backup jobs, initiating web server warm-ups, checking on stale DNS records, sending emails reports, executing shell scripts on remote servers, updating firewall rules during peak times of day (think home brew auto-scaling logic), and later on, integrating with Git repositories, and deploying code and config to servers in data-centers.

On a side note, did you know Jenkins used to be called Hudson? It has been around since 2005, and deploying code from Git is only one of the many many things it is otherwise used for by professionals.

Always think outside the box…