Keep Your Jenkins, Lose the Headaches: How to Scale Software Delivery Without a Migration

For years, Jenkins has been the engine of software delivery, powering pipelines with its unmatched flexibility and vast ecosystem. But as your organization scales, that power comes with a price.

The fragmentation is too obvious to ignore: a sprawl of Jenkins controllers, inconsistent security practices, and a tangled mess of brittle scripts for release orchestration. While the need to modernize is looming, a full-scale migration - ripping out and replacing your developers' most trusted tools - that costs time and money simply isn’t possible.

This is the central dilemma facing thousands of organizations. Modernization is essential for security and speed, but migrations are notorious for their cost, risk, and impact on developer productivity. A recent industry report on database migrations found that 94% of these critical projects miss their deadlines, leading to revenue loss and customer experience issues.

CloudBees Unify solves this problem by meeting you where you are. With deep, native integration for Jenkins, Unify transforms it from a tactical CI tool into a comprehensive AI-powered DevOps solution. Your developers continue working exactly as they do today, while you gain the enterprise-grade scale, security, and visibility you've been missing.

This isn’t just about new features; it's about solving your most pressing leadership challenges.

1. Empower Developers, Don't Disrupt Them: Your developers and administrators are fluent in Jenkins. They've built their careers and their workflows around it. A migration project introduces a massive productivity dip, forcing context-switching and creating friction. With Unify, there’s no migration. A lightweight integration surfaces CloudBees capabilities directly within their existing workflows.
   
   Outcome: You avoid developer resistance, maintain team morale, and ensure teams remain productive from day one. You keep your talent, and your pipelines keep flowing.
   
   

2. Centralize Governance and Visibility at Enterprise Scale: Leaders can’t manage what they can’t see. Without a unified view, security and compliance become manual, reactive processes. Unify provides unified visibility across all your Jenkins controllers and other CI tools like GitHub Actions. This gives you consolidated dashboards for workflow runs, test results, artifacts and security scan findings across your entire CI landscape.
   
   Outcome: You finally get a single, accurate view of your CI activity and test trends. You can identify which teams are using which tools and spot security vulnerabilities earlier in the development cycle.
   
   

3. Move from Brittle Scripts to Reliable Releases: Jenkins was built for single-repo automation, but today's applications are complex, multi-service, and multi-repo. Orchestrating a release across dozens of teams and repositories often relies on fragile, tribal-knowledge-based scripts. By registering artifacts from your Jenkins builds in CloudBees Unify, you unlock the ability to use Unify's application modeling and release orchestration and auditing capabilities. Your Jenkins-built artifacts become first-class citizens in coordinated, multi-service releases, allowing platform teams to coordinate deployments directly from a central control plane.
   
   Outcome: You can now orchestrate releases that include Jenkins-built components alongside artifacts from other CI tools, all through CloudBees Unify's release workflows. This creates a bridge between your existing Jenkins investments and modern release coordination. You replace fragile, risky manual steps with auditable, automated workflows, building confidence in every deployment.
   
   

4. Build Security and Compliance into Every Pipeline: Security shouldn't be a last-minute audit. With Unify, every code change can be automatically scanned for vulnerabilities using out-of-the-box security tools, with results surfaced in a dedicated Security Center. Compliance and quality gates are applied centrally, not at the whim of individual teams.
   
   Outcome: You build audit-ready pipelines, dramatically reducing security risk and the operational overhead of compliance cycles. You shift security "left," making it a standard part of your delivery process.

Do These Sound Familiar?

• You’re managing 5+ Jenkins controllers and can’t answer “which pipelines are broken right now?” without checking each one.

• A security audit asked “show me all pipelines scanning for vulnerabilities” and you lost three days chasing Jenkinsfiles.

• Developers complain about flaky tests, but there’s no unified view to spot the worst offenders.

• Releases feel fragile - no clear picture of what’s actually in production.

If any of that rings true, you’ll want a fast, visible path to value. Here’s how you can go from disconnected Jenkins chaos to cross-org visibility in just weeks, starting with proof in 30 minutes.

Goal: Unified CI visibility, no pipeline changes.
Actions:

1. Connect your first Jenkins controller (5 min)

2. Integrate with your GitHub repo (10 min)

3. Create a linked component (2 min)

You get: A single dashboard showing Jenkins + GitHub Actions builds, test history, and automatic security findings.
Value: Immediate proof - multiple CI systems, one view.

Goal: End-to-end visibility for one component.
Actions:

• Add registerBuildArtifactMetadata and archiveArtifacts steps to your Jenkins pipeline.

• Publish security scan results (SARIF).

You get: Artifact traceability, actionable security findings, and test summaries, all without restructuring pipelines.
Value: The full picture for one component, from commit to build to security vulnerabilities.

Goal: Multi-CI intelligence across all critical components.
Actions:

• Repeat the Quick Start for your top 5–10 components.

• Connect additional Jenkins controllers as needed.

You get: Cross-org test insights, multi-CI visibility, and centralized security findings.
Value: No more logging into five Jenkins dashboards - answer “what’s broken?” in seconds.

Goal: Organization-wide security visibility.
Actions: Publish SARIF scan results for all onboarded components.
You get: Centralized dashboard, vulnerability trends, and audit-ready reports.
Value: Turn scattered findings into intelligence; prep for audits in hours, not days.

Goal: Full build-to-release lineage.
Actions: Add registerBuildArtifactMetadata and archiveArtifacts steps across key pipelines.
You get: Clear artifact provenance and readiness for coordinated release orchestration.
Value: Instantly answer “what code is in production?” and accelerate incident response.

In under three weeks, teams move from disconnected Jenkins data to unified visibility - across builds, tests, artifacts, and security. The result: faster audits, fewer production surprises, and engineers who spend more time fixing problems than finding them.

Development teams are constantly under pressure to balance speed, risk, and efficiency. While modernization is essential, throwing away significant investments in Jenkins simply isn’t possible. With CloudBees Unify, you keep the parts that work and upgrade everything around them to meet the demands of enterprise-scale software delivery.

You don’t have to choose between keeping your developers happy and modernizing your software delivery. With Unify, you do both.

See how fast you can modernize without migrating.

Start your 30-minute Jenkins integration with CloudBees Unify today