Fifteen months to retire the legacy pipeline

Confidential · Manufacturing

The business said

  • “Patch the aging Jenkins servers again”
  • “Hire more release engineers”
  • “Freeze deployments to cut the error rate”
  • “Swap tools overnight and hope”
  • “Standardize the workflows and automate everything from build to deploy”
Slow, error-prone releases were not a people problem. They were a pipeline problem: legacy CI, inconsistent workflows, and deployments done by hand.

A CI/CD modernization: legacy Jenkins to Azure DevOps, deployments to Helm

An equipment manufacturing group ran its middleware and customer-facing applications across three affiliated business units, and all of it built and shipped through an outdated Jenkins setup. Every team had its own workflow, deployments needed manual steps, and the error rate rose with every release. The instinct was to add people or slow down. The actual problem was that the delivery machinery itself had aged out.

Over fifteen months we replaced the machinery without stopping the factory. Middleware services moved from Jenkins to Azure DevOps, gaining modern pipelines-as-code. Java development across the units was put on one standardized workflow: code reviews, unit tests, and static quality gates through SonarQube, so every change passed the same bar regardless of which team wrote it.

Then we removed the hands from deployment. Automated build and release pipelines were created for the middleware and the customer application, and deployments moved to Helm charts on Kubernetes, so every environment received the same, versioned, repeatable release instead of a hand-assembled one. Rollbacks became a chart version, not an archaeology project.

The units now share one delivery platform: shorter development cycles, fewer failed releases, and code quality enforced by the pipeline rather than by heroics. The releases that used to be scheduled around risk are now routine.

  • 15 months, engagement
  • Jenkins to Azure DevOps, CI moved
  • Helm charts, deploys
  • SonarQube, quality gate
  • 3 on one platform, business units
CI/CD pipeline view after migration from legacy Jenkins to Azure DevOps with Helm-based deployments