Product Updates

Keep Your Builds Fast and Your Logs Under Control: Introducing Pluggable Storage for Build Logs

Written by: Jake Leon

3 min read

As software delivery pipelines scale, one of the sneakiest performance killers isn’t your code, your agents, or even your network - it’s your build logs.

Over time, logs silently pile up in Jenkins home directories, eating away at disk space, slowing down controllers, complicating backups, and making audits a painful exercise. Many teams patch around the problem with custom scripts, rigid retention policies, or expensive storage workarounds.

But these fixes come at a cost: slower builds, frustrated developers, fragile recovery strategies, and lost time.

CloudBees CI now offers a better way.

Why Log Management Matters More Than You Think

For most organizations, logs aren’t just build exhaust - they’re the source of truth when something goes wrong. You need them for:

  • Developer productivity: troubleshooting failed builds quickly.

  • Compliance: retaining evidence for auditors.

  • Business continuity: restoring pipelines after a disaster.

  • Analytics: spotting flaky tests or performance trends across time.

The problem? When all those logs live flat on the filesystem, you hit walls fast: disk limits, painfully slow backups, and brittle DR processes. In other words: you’re paying for logs twice - once in storage and once in lost productivity.

Meet Pluggable Storage for Build Logs

With CloudBees CI Pluggable Storage for Build Logs, you can now externalize build logs to cloud object storage or observability systems - without losing the log viewing experience your developers expect.

Think of it as offloading your logs to a scalable, cost-efficient home, while your CI controllers stay lean and fast.

Key capabilities include:

  • Scalable, cost-effective storage: Automatically offload logs to AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob.

  • Performance stability: Free up controller disk space shortening backup and recovery times, and preventing “disk full” failures.

  • Compliance and audit readiness: Apply enterprise-grade retention and backup policies with easier log retrieval for audits.

  • Seamless developer experience: Developers access logs the same way they do today in CloudBees CI - no retraining required.

  • Observability readiness: Route logs to external observability platforms for advanced analysis from your buckets.

The cost savings are clear. For example, based on standard costs for Amazon’s EFS ($.30 per gb/month) which is where many organizations operate their Jenkins environment today, an organization with 1000 GB of build logs monthly ($300 per month on EFS) can save approximately $277 per month ($.023 per gb/month for Amazon’s S3) - without disrupting the flow of your developers.

“CloudBees Pluggable Storage has significantly improved our pipeline performance and operational efficiency. By offloading build logs to external object storage, we've reduced strain on our Jenkins controllers and minimized disk usage. This has led to faster builds, easier log retrieval, and better scalability - all while maintaining a smooth developer experience. The ability to leverage low-cost cloud storage also aligns well with our cost optimization goals.”

Lead DevOps Engineer

Multinational Financial Services Company

From Pain Points to Resiliency

Here’s what Pluggable Storage translates to for your teams:

  • Lower costs → Store logs in affordable, policy-driven cloud storage instead of bloated local disks.

  • Happier auditors → Pull the logs you need without complex retention scripts or downtime.

  • Future-proof CI → Move toward a modern, stateless architecture that scales with your business.

Getting Started

Pluggable Storage is available in CloudBees as part of our ongoing effort to modernize CI for the cloud-native era. Whether you’re looking to meet compliance requirements, cut costs, or just stop firefighting disk space issues, this feature is built to help you scale with confidence.

Schedule a demo and see how CloudBees can keep your builds fast, your logs under control, and your teams focused on what matters - delivering software.

Stay up-to-date with the latest insights

Sign up today for the CloudBees newsletter and get our latest and greatest how-to’s and developer insights, product updates and company news!