Case Studies / Enterprise Technology

CI/CD Migration • Enterprise Technology

Enterprise CI/CD Migration: Racing Against End-of-Life

How we executed an enterprise-scale CI/CD platform migration under a hard end-of-life deadline — migrating 800 pipelines five months ahead of schedule with zero downtime across the organization.

IndustryEnterprise Technology Duration5 months TeamCross-functional engineering team PublishedNovember 19, 2024
0msDOWNTIME
0
Pipelines Migrated
Complex multi-platform workflows
0 Mo
Accelerated Timeline
Beat the end-of-life deadline
0%
Knowledge Transfer
Team fully self-sufficient
The challenge

An end-of-life deadline for a business-critical CI/CD platform

Our client's CI/CD platform was approaching a hard end-of-life deadline, putting hundreds of active build and deployment pipelines at risk. With engineering teams depending on the platform daily, any migration plan had to guarantee continuity while replatforming at scale.

Key pain points included:

  • A hard vendor end-of-life deadline for the existing CI/CD platform
  • 800 active pipelines spanning multiple teams and application stacks
  • Zero tolerance for build or deployment downtime during the transition
  • The need to fully transfer operational knowledge to the internal team
Our solution

A phased migration built for zero downtime

We ran the migration as a structured, phased program — validating each batch of pipelines before cutover, so daily delivery was never at risk.

1

Migration Planning & Sequencing

Audited and grouped the full pipeline inventory by dependency and risk, sequencing the 800-pipeline migration to protect the teams with the tightest delivery timelines first.

2

Parallel Pipeline Validation

Stood up and validated each migrated pipeline in parallel with the legacy version before cutover, confirming equivalent build and deployment behavior at every step.

3

Zero-Downtime Cutover Process

Executed cutovers in small, reversible batches with rollback paths defined in advance, keeping build and deployment availability at 100% throughout the migration.

4

Knowledge Transfer & Enablement

Documented the new platform end-to-end and trained the internal team on operating it independently, achieving full self-sufficiency ahead of project close.

Implementation timeline

Five months, ahead of a hard deadline

PHASE 1

Discovery & Migration Planning

Catalogued all 800 pipelines, mapped dependencies, and built the phased migration sequence against the end-of-life deadline.

PHASE 2

Batch Migration & Validation

Migrated pipelines in validated batches, confirming equivalent behavior before each cutover.

PHASE 3

Full Cutover

Completed the remaining pipeline migrations with zero downtime, five months ahead of the original schedule.

PHASE 4

Knowledge Transfer

Transferred full operational ownership to the internal engineering team.

Results & impact

Ahead of deadline, with zero downtime

The migration met every constraint that mattered most — timeline, continuity, and long-term ownership:

Delivery Continuity

  • Zero pipeline downtime across the migration
  • 800 pipelines successfully migrated
  • No disruption to active development teams

Program Outcomes

  • Beat the end-of-life deadline by 5 months
  • 100% of operational knowledge transferred
  • Team fully self-sufficient on the new platform

Racing against a hard vendor deadline, the team avoided any disruption to daily delivery while completing the migration well ahead of schedule — and left the client fully equipped to operate the new platform independently.

Ready to create your success story?

Let's discuss how we can help you achieve similar results for your organization.