CI/CD workflows are essential for modern software development, enabling scalability, seamless integration, and ease of workflow management. However, migrating these workflows between tools—such as from Jenkins to Bitbucket Pipelines—can feel daunting due to differences in syntax, custom configurations, and repository-specific setups. To address these challenges, we’re thrilled to announce the Jenkins to Bitbucket Pipelines Migration Tool. This new tool is designed to start your transition to a cloud-based CI/CD workflow with confidence, ensuring a smooth migration through the entire process.
Along with comprehensive guides, automated tooling now streamlines the migration process from Jenkins to Pipelines, making it easier and more efficient. The migration tool is also designed with flexibility and customizability in mind, accounting for Jenkins’ custom and home-grown plugins through extensibility. External developers are encouraged to contribute back to the tool to add translations for additional Jenkins plugins into Bitbucket Pipelines.
Why migrate to Bitbucket Pipelines?
Migrating to Bitbucket Pipelines unlocks a fully managed, cloud-based CI/CD platform that not only reduces operational overhead, but offers elastic scaling to match your team’s workflows & demands. Unlike on-premises CI/CD where a fixed number of build agents can lead to delays, bottlenecks, and productivity loss; Bitbucket Pipelines provides instant, elastic scaling – meaning builds start immediately without queues or delays.
This shift to the cloud alleviates the significant infrastructure management burden of maintaining hardware, security, and upgrades for on-prem CI servers; allowing your team to focus solely on delivering quality code. In fact, when looking at total cost of ownership, cloud-based CI/CD can be up to 70% cheaper to run at scale than self-hosted equivalents due to the massive reduction in operational overheads that come along with running your own on-prem CI platform.
In addition, organization-level CI/CD orchestration tooling ensures that compliance and governance standards are met across every repository, all from a centralized location within your workspace.
How does it work?
The Jenkins to Pipelines migration tool is an open-source, automated tool that converts declarative Jenkins files into Bitbucket Pipelines YAML syntax. This tool simplifies the translation process, reducing manual effort and accelerating migration.
The migration tool translates the most common features of typical Jenkins files and clearly marks any unconverted elements, allowing for manual review and translation as needed. While not every Jenkins plugin is supported at this moment, the tool is designed with extensibility in mind, with plans to broaden support for additional plugins over time based on community feedback and diverse use cases.
Due to the plugin-based nature of Jenkins, not every configuration in a Jenkins workflow can be accounted for, especially when custom plugins are involved. To solve this issue, the tool has been built to allow customers to write their own custom translation logic for the tool itself, allowing them to also automate the process of migrating Jenkins workflows that implement totally custom Jenkins functionality.
Getting started
Ready to start your migration? Here’s how to begin:
- Access the Tool: Find the migration tool in our open-source repository.
- Follow the Documentation: Our step-by-step guide cover each phase of the migration, review its core capabilities, offering setup instructions, configuration tips, and best practices
Want to explore further? Check out our guided demo or become a member of the Bitbucket Pipelines community. This is the perfect place to ask questions, share your feedback, and express which Jenkins plugins you would like to see supported. The community will serve as your central hub for collaboration and feedback throughout the open beta phase. This is also where we’ll provide support to everyone involved in the open beta. If you have questions or need assistance, just create a post in this space, and we’ll help you get started.
After the beta
This is the beginning of our commitment to simplifying CI/CD migrations. Your feedback is essential in shaping future updates and improvements. Looking ahead, plans include enhancing this migration tool by continuously adding more plugins based on your requests and expanding its capabilities to support additional platforms, such as Bamboo. This will enable teams to fully utilize Bitbucket Pipelines, ensuring a seamless, scalable, cloud-based CI/CD solution. Stay tuned as the tools evolve and offerings broaden!