Streamlining CI/CD Processes: A Comparative Analysis and Migration Strategy from Jenkins to Bitbucket Pipelines

Abstract

This thesis presents a case study that conducts a comparative analysis between Jenkins and Bitbucket Pipelines by replicating and examining a CI/CD deployment pipeline for an IoT platform on AWS. The technical features, cost implications, and performance metrics are assessed. It is found that Jenkins offers lower direct computational costs but incurs significant personnel expenses due to the requirement of infrastructure maintenance. In contrast, Bitbucket Pipelines, though higher in computational cost, is observed to remove maintenance overhead by virtue of its managed service structure.

In terms of features, it is highlighted that Bitbucket Pipelines lacks support for dynamic step execution and possesses limited parallelization capabilities, potentially impacting the scalability and flexibility in more complex deployment processes. The performance evaluation indicates that Bitbucket Pipelines has an advantage in deployment times but also faces limitations due to memory constraints for specific tasks.

It is concluded in the thesis that Bitbucket Pipelines offers reduced operational complexity and quicker deployment times, yet organizations are advised to consider the trade-offs in features and memory requirements against the cost benefits when contemplating a shift from Jenkins to Bitbucket Pipelines for their cloud-based CI/CD operations.