Updated on: October 8th, 2026
Jenkins has long been one of the most popular choices for running CI pipelines, thanks to its flexibility and the thousands of plugins that let teams connect it to almost any tool. As organizations grow, though, many end up running many separate Jenkins controllers, each with its own plugin versions, security settings, and administrators. Keeping them consistent becomes a job in itself.
Coding agents are adding to that load. They are writing more of the code, which means more builds and more pipelines running through controllers that were sized for people. According to our State of Code Abundance Report, more than half of organizations (54%) say their CI/CD costs are climbing.
Many teams assume the only way forward is to replace Jenkins entirely, but migrations are notorious for their cost, risk, and impact on developer productivity. In our Migration Index, a survey of more than 300 enterprise IT leaders, 77% said their platform migrations ran more than 10% over budget, and only 25% saw the expected value within a year.
What if you could get the benefits of modernizing without the pain of migration?
CloudBees CI is the enterprise version of the Jenkins you already run: supported, secured, and built to scale. It brings your existing controllers into one CI estate your team owns, and adds the central management, security, and high availability that large Jenkins environments need. Developers keep working exactly as they do today, while platform and security teams gain control across the entire Jenkins estate.
Each capability addresses a specific challenge that engineering and security leaders face as their Jenkins footprint grows.
1. Keep developers productive
Your developers and administrators are fluent in Jenkins and have spent years building their workflows around it. A migration could force them to relearn their tools and rebuild processes that already work. According to our Migration Index, 68% of IT leaders say tool consolidation reduced productivity, while 70% report increased developer burnout.
With CloudBees CI, there is no forklift migration. Your pipelines, plugins, and Jenkins skills carry over, and you adopt controller by controller at your own pace, with a named lead on both sides. Pipeline Explorer guides developers to where and why a build failed, so feedback loops stay short.
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. Bring every controller into one CI estate
Without a single command point across controllers, every upgrade, plugin change, and security check turns into manual, reactive work. Operations Center gives you command across every controller, with each controller's health and status in one view. Configuration as Code rebuilds controllers the same way every time, and template catalogs roll out pipeline standards with one update.
Outcome: You get one estate your team controls instead of islands of isolated Jenkins instances, and standards that hold as teams and pipelines grow.
3. Carry more builds without a rebuild
More code from coding agents means more builds hitting every controller. Pipelines sized for human-paced delivery start to queue, and when a controller goes down, every developer waits.
CloudBees CI scales horizontally, so you add controllers as commit volume climbs. Active-active high availability with auto-failover keeps builds running if a controller fails, scoped to your environment and plugin set. It runs on your managed Kubernetes (such as EKS, AKS, or GKE), on-prem Kubernetes, VMs, or bare metal.
Outcome: CI holds as coding-agent volume climbs, so releases don't slip because the pipeline did.
4. Build security and compliance into every pipeline
Security checks work best when they run on every change, long before an audit. With CloudBees CI, every account, human or agent, works under least privilege through RBAC and service accounts. Through the CloudBees Assurance Program and Beekeeper, plugins are vetted, CVEs are handled, and updates are shipped. And every code change, whether a developer or a coding agent wrote it, runs through pipeline templates that build in required steps like security scans and approvals. Humans define the policy once in centrally managed Configuration as Code bundles, and every team follows the same rules.
Outcome: You build audit-ready pipelines, reducing security risk and operational overhead associated with compliance cycles. You shift security "left," making it a standard part of your delivery process.
How to get started with CloudBees CI
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, with no clear picture of what's actually in production.
- Build volume keeps climbing as teams adopt AI coding tools, and no one can say which controllers are under strain or what it's costing.
If any of these sound familiar, start with a 60-minute discovery on your controllers, plugins, and access. From there, adoption is incremental: existing pipelines keep running while you move to CloudBees CI controller by controller.
Teams keep their pipelines and their Jenkins skills, and platform teams get one estate they control. That leads to fewer outages, simpler upgrades, and fewer surprises in production.
Keep your pipelines and upgrade everything around them
Development teams are under constant pressure to balance speed, risk, and cost. The growing volume of AI-generated code is raising the stakes on all three. With CloudBees CI, you keep the Jenkins pipelines that already work and add the central management, security, and scale that enterprise delivery now demands. And when that volume lands on your test suite next, CloudBees Smart Tests runs only the tests each change touches.
Your developers stay in the tools they know, and your organization gets the control it needs to keep modernizing.
See how fast you can modernize without migrating.
Book a 60-minute CloudBees CI discovery session
