If you’ve been in DevOps for a while, chances are your CI/CD journey started with Jenkins. For me, I started with AWS CodePipeline which is propriety to AWS. It is very easy to use and setup but it lacks customization and integrations with third party tools.
When I started using Jenkins and I was able to customize my pipeline and integrate with other tools by downloading their plugin waoh - it felt like magic.
Jenkins earned its reputation as the go-to CI tool because it was open-source, flexible, and had a plugin for almost everything. Entire engineering teams built their automation practices on top of it, and for years, it was the backbone of software delivery pipelines. Jenkins might be legacy CI tool but it still shape today modern DevOps world.
But with that flexibility came challenges. Managing plugins, maintaining servers, and scaling Jenkins across teams often felt like a job of its own. Jenkins was designed before containers and cloud-native patterns became the norm, which makes it feel more “legacy” in today’s fast-moving DevOps world.
Now, with tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and cloud-native solutions like ArgoCD, teams can build pipelines that are easier to manage, faster to scale, and better aligned with modern workflows.
That said, Jenkins still has a place in many organizations — especially where deep customization and legacy workloads exist. It’s hard to ignore the impact it’s had on DevOps as a practice.
I’m curious: is Jenkins still part of your CI/CD setup, or have you fully transitioned to newer tools?
Top comments (0)