[Build] merge changes to run-tests-jenkins from master branch

Author: Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas@gmail.com>
Author: nchammas <nicholas.chammas@gmail.com>

Closes #2237 from nchammas/branch-1.1 and squashes the following commits:

39bdd5e [Nicholas Chammas] merge updates from master
f5aa841 [nchammas] Merge pull request #3 from apache/branch-1.1