The Challenge: Scaling Jenkins in the Enterprise
If you’re running Jenkins at enterprise scale, you know the drill: it’s powerful, flexible, and battle-tested. But once your organization grows, cracks start to show. In our recent webinar, we broke down why traditional Jenkins setups struggle as organizations grow, and outlined a clear path forward.
The two most common scaling patterns we see are:
Monolithic Jenkins Controllers: One massive controller supporting dozens of teams. Great until it fails. Then everything stops.
Islands of Jenkins: Multiple disconnected controllers spun up by teams or regions. This avoids single points of failure but creates silos, overhead, and inconsistent processes.
The result? Tool sprawl, lack of visibility, and a frustrating inability to see at a single glance what’s happening across your software factory.
For platform leads, that lack of visibility and scalability means risk, inefficiency, and frustrated dev teams.
CloudBees CI: Jenkins at Scale
CloudBees CI was built to solve the challenges Jenkins users hit as they scale. It’s Jenkins at the core, but hardened for enterprise workloads:
Centralized Management: Gain a “single pane of glass” across all your controllers and pipelines; no more operating without visibility.
High Availability and Horizontal Scaling: If a controller fails, another spins up automatically on Kubernetes. Jobs keep running, developers keep working.
Verified Plugins (CAP): No more chasing plugin compatibility or security issues. The CloudBees Assurance Program ensures supported, safe plugins across environments.
Enterprise-Grade Security and Compliance: Get the monitoring, auditing, and controls that Jenkins doesn’t provide out of the box.
In short: if you’ve outgrown Jenkins, CloudBees CI gives you scale, resilience, and peace of mind, without needing to rip and replace.
Real-World Proof
IRS: Uses a secured version of CloudBees CI to meet strict compliance and privacy mandates.
Salesforce: Runs CloudBees CI at scale to accelerate innovation in cloud-native environments.
Two very different use cases, one consistent outcome: scalable, resilient delivery pipelines.
Beyond CI: CloudBees Unify
Scaling CI/CD is just one piece of the puzzle. CloudBees Unify is a control plane that connects build, test, deploy, and release processes across your entire toolchain.
Works with Jenkins, CloudBees CI, GitHub Actions, or other CI/CD tools.
Provides visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Leverages AI/automation to speed up decisions (right inside developers’ IDEs).
This means you can modernize incrementally, connecting tools you already use instead of being forced into a closed platform.
Why It Matters for Jenkins User
Jenkins is great for starting out, but it wasn’t built for enterprise scale on its own. You can either choose to migrate Jenkins to CloudBees CI and gain access to enterprise-grade CI capabilities, or you can integrate your Jenkins directly with CloudBees Unify to keep your Jenkins workflows, but add the resilience and visibility you need to scale. With CloudBees, it’s easy to choose the path that works best for your organization.
Or as I like to say:
“Scaling DevOps isn’t just about adding tools - it’s about building alignment, agility, and visibility across the SDLC. CloudBees CI and Unify deliver exactly that.
Liz Ryan
Sr. Product Marketing Manager
Company - CloudBees
Final Takeaway
If you’re a platform engineer or lead relying on Jenkins, the path forward doesn’t mean abandoning what works. Instead, you can modernize and scale Jenkins with CloudBees CI and Unify, gaining reliability, compliance, and enterprise-wide visibility, without forcing your teams into a rigid ecosystem.
Learn how CloudBees Unify brings visibility and resilience to your toolchain.