Modernize To An AI DevOps Platform in One Day: The Case for Moving Beyond Jenkins

Jenkins has been a mainstay in CI/CD, helping teams across the globe automate their build, test, and deployment workflows for over a decade. But with the explosion of AI-generated code, software delivery is expected to accelerate, and the need for faster, more reliable releases has gone up more than ever. Jenkins is showing its age. Organizations now find themselves wrestling with bloated, hard-to-maintain Jenkins pipelines, excessive infrastructure demands, and operational drag that stifles innovation.

It’s time for a change. With Harness, you can modernize your pipelines in just one day using our patented migration tool. Thus, with our AI DevOps platform, you can dramatically reduce complexity, accelerate deployments, and free your teams to focus on what matters: delivering value at speed. 

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Why It’s Time to Move On

For years, Jenkins was synonymous with CI/CD flexibility. Its open source roots, rich plugin ecosystem, and ubiquity made it the go-to for teams taking their first steps into automation. But today’s environment is different. Organizations are running hundreds or thousands of Jenkins jobs, many of which are barely used yet still consume precious resources. Jenkins setups are notorious for their appetite for RAM and CPU, often requiring a dedicated team just to stay operational.

The challenges are clear:

• Resource intensity: Jenkins can slow down your entire infrastructure as your pipelines grow in number and complexity
  
• Plugin nightmares: Compatibility issues, abandoned plugins, and manual upgrades create technical debt and security issues
  
• Maintenance overload: Configurations drift, and recreating lost or corrupted setups becomes nearly impossible
  
• Limited support for modern DevOps: Jenkins struggles with infrastructure-as-code, container orchestration, and truly ephemeral environments, i.e., must-haves for cloud-native development
  
  

Why Modern CI/CD Matters

More and more code is generated, especially because of AI, but software delivery has remained the bottleneck. Modern software delivery demands more than just pipeline automation. Software delivery requires AI to complement AI-powered code generation so that it can scale effortlessly, streamline governance, and empower developers with AI-driven insights and self-service capabilities.

Harness is the AI for Software Delivery: Harness has a suite of purpose-built AI agents that help you deliver software fast and in a secure manner while integrating seamlessly with Kubernetes, cloud runtimes, and on-prem environments, which results in: 

• 80% faster builds and deployments: Optimized infrastructure and intelligent scheduling mean your team spends less time waiting and more time shipping.
  
• 80% reduction in pipeline maintenance overhead: Template-based, reusable workflows replace sprawling pipeline sprawl and reduce technical debt.
  
• Built-in security, compliance, and governance: Including integrated secrets management, role-based access, and policy-as-code, ensure that all pipelines meet organizational standards.
  
• AI-powered test selection and automated rollbacks: Harness selects tests to run using AI based on code changes so that not every test needs to run for each pull request. Harness not only detects issues faster, but also suggests and implements recovery steps, minimizing downtime.

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The Migration Path: Structured, Fast, and Painless

Migrating off Jenkins may seem daunting, especially for organizations with years of accumulated pipeline logic and custom scripts. But Harness provides a structured, phased approach that minimizes risk and accelerates the adoption. The focus is on modernizing your DevOps, not just migrating. From our experience, if you have thousands of Jenkins pipelines, you only need a fraction of them. So we don’t migrate each Jenkins pipeline. We consolidate them into smart templates so that the overhead of maintaining the pipeline is minimized.

Phase 1: Assess and Plan
Identify high-value, high-impact pipelines for initial migration. With our patented Jenkins Migration tool, you can automatically analyze your existing setup and prioritize the most critical workloads for modernization. Harness CI/CD specialists guide you at every step.

Phase 2: Pilot and Optimize
Migrate a single pipeline end-to-end to Harness, leveraging built-in template libraries, AI-generated workflows, and Harness’s differentiated features. Compare performance, reliability, and developer experience before scaling.

Phase 3: Scale and Sunset
Once your migration plan is proven, expand modernization and adoption across teams. Achieve significant Harness adoption in weeks, not months, and progressively sunset your Jenkins infrastructure, switching off the maintenance drain for good without any downtime.

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Real-World Impact: From Chaos to Control

Leading technology company Ancestry.com reduced its pipeline sprawl by 80:1 after migrating from Jenkins to Harness, cutting pipeline maintenance costs by 72%, accelerating time-to-market, and improving pipeline reliability. 

Meanwhile, Citigroup leverages Harness to support 20,000 engineers. By automating tests and security scans with strong policy controls, Citi goes from build to running in production in under 7 minutes.

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The Call to Action: Modernize Fast

Jenkins served its purpose in the era of server farms and script-heavy automation. But the pace of software delivery has changed, and so should your toolchain. Modernize your pipelines without disrupting your delivery velocity to prepare for an AI-native world and unlock the next era of DevOps efficiency, security, and developer happiness.

Take the first step toward DevOps spring cleaning. Let expert CI/CD specialists guide you, migrate your first pipeline at no cost, and experience the difference an AI DevOps platform can make.

It’s time to break free from Jenkins and build & deploy the future, faster.