Why We Replaced Jenkins With GitHub Actions (And Never Looked Back)

Our Jenkins instance was “perfectly fine” until we actually added up the hidden costs. Here’s why we migrated 127 pipelines to GitHub Actions and how it went.

Our Jenkins server had been running for six years. It was a 32GB EC2 instance that we threw more RAM at every six months. The dashboard was a sea of green checkmarks. Everything was “working fine.”

Except it wasn’t.

Jenkins had become that coworker everyone avoids asking for help. Sure, they get the job done, but the amount of tribal knowledge required to work with them is exhausting. New developers would spend their first week just getting access to Jenkins, understanding our Groovy pipeline syntax, and figuring out why their build was queued behind 47 other jobs.

When GitHub Actions came out of beta, we dismissed it. “We already have CI/CD,” we said. “Why fix what isn’t broken?”

Then we actually calculated what Jenkins was costing us.

The Hidden Costs We Didn’t See

The EC2 instance cost $240/month. Fine. But that wasn’t the real cost.