Data StreamingSourced

Case Study: How Confluent cut build and release times up to 75% by migrating from Jenkins to Semaphore

Confluent Case StudySourced & dated by Case Study Desk

Key facts · TL;DR

Company

Confluent

Industry

Data Streaming

Challenge

Hours-long builds and releases on Jenkins

Headline result

Confluent reduced packaging builds 70% and release pipelines 75% after moving CI/CD from Jenkins to Semaphore

Key results

-70%

Packaging build time

7.5 hours to 2.5 hours

-75%

Release pipeline time

30-35 hours to 8 hours

-50%

Resource usage

vs. Jenkins

The challenge

Confluent, the data-streaming company behind commercial Apache Kafka, ran packaging builds and release pipelines that took many hours on its Jenkins-based CI setup. Long-running, monolithic builds slowed the team's ability to ship.

The solution

Confluent migrated its CI/CD to Semaphore and modularized and parallelized its packaging and release workflows so they ran as smaller concurrent jobs.

“By modularizing and parallelizing, we transformed hours-long builds into sleek, efficient workflows.”
SW
Sneha Wadhwa
Senior Software Engineer II, Confluent

The results, in context

Confluent reported that packaging builds fell from 7.5 hours to 2.5 hours (70% faster), release pipelines dropped from 30-35 hours to 8 hours (75% faster), and resource usage fell 50%. The figures are quoted from Semaphore's published Confluent story and dated October 14, 2025.

Products used

Semaphore CI/CD pipelinesSemaphore Parallel jobs