How to prevent certain Jenkins jobs from running simultaneously?

I have a couple of jobs that use a shared resource (database), which sometimes can cause builds to fail in the (rare) event that the jobs happen to get triggered simultaneously.

Given jobs A through E, for example, is there any way to specify that A and C should never be run concurrently?

Other than the aforementioned resource, the builds are independent of each other (not e.g. in a upstream/downstream relation).

A "brute-force" way would be limiting number of executors to one, but that obviously is less than ideal if most jobs could well be executed concurrently and there's no lack of computing resources on the build server.

There are currently 2 ways of doing this:

• Use the Throttle Concurrent Builds plugin.
• Set up those jobs to run on a slave having only 1 executor.

The Locks and Latches plugin here should help.

This question is probably a dupe of How do I ensure that only one of a certain category of job runs at once in Hudson?

That's an old question, but the topic can still be relevant, especially when running application tests on Jenkins.

The Lockable Resources Plugin allows you to define lockable resources that can be used by builds. If your build requires an resource, it takes the lock. If a second build requires the same resource (which then is already locked), it will be queued for the resource to be free.

Although the docs use computers or printers as examples for lockable resources, the database example from above should work as well.

In opposite to the Locks and Latches Plugin mentioned in answers from 2012, this package seems to be currently maintained (currently ~2016).