CloudBees Amazon AWS CLI plugin end-of-life announcement

Symptoms

An administrative monitor is displayed in CloudBees CI, stating that the CloudBees Amazon AWS CLI plugin (cloudbees-aws-cli) will reach end-of-life (EOL) in December 2025.

Environment

Diagnosis/Treatment

The administrative monitor has detected that the CloudBees Amazon AWS CLI plugin is installed to your instance. This plugin allows you to install the AWS SDK v1 dynamically into your agents for your builds to use. However, the AWS SDK for Java v1 end-of-support is 31 December 2025 and new AWS features require AWS SDK for Java v2.

In addition, dynamically installing the SDK during the build makes your pipelines more fragile, as they depend on an external agent to succeed.

For these reasons, the CloudBees Amazon AWS CLI plugin will be EOL in December, 2025.

Resolution

Instead of dynamically installing the AWS SDK CLI plugin to CloudBees CI agents during runtime, CloudBees strongly recommends that you add it to the agent definition, so is always available at runtime.

The AWS Credentials plugin allows you to define and provide proper AWS credentials for your agents, so shell steps can be used to invoke the AWS CLI, similar to the CloudBees Amazon AWS CLI plugin. The AWS Credentials plugin allows you to store proper AWS credentials in CloudBees CI, and then link its values to CLI recognized environment variables, so they are used by the AWS CLI.

For example, instead of:

podTemplate(cloud: 'kubernetes') {
    node(POD_LABEL) {
        withAwsCli(credentials:"aws-credentials") {
            sh 'aws -h'// some block
        }
    }
}▼

Use this instead:

podTemplate(cloud: 'kubernetes') {
    node(POD_LABEL) {
        withCredentials([aws(accessKeyVariable: 'AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID',
          credentialsId: 'aws-credentials',
          secretKeyVariable: 'AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY')]) { // Set the env vars needed for the AWS CLI
            sh 'aws -h'// Preinstalled CLI
        }
    }
}▼

This approach has several advantages:

There is no need to download and install the AWS CLI for every build; this is only done during the agent build time.
Faster build times.
More reliable and scalable Pipelines, as they will not be affected by third-party systems availability.
If a new SDK version is released, only the agent definition needs to change, without changes in Pipelines or a new CloudBees CI release.

The CloudBees Amazon AWS CLI plugin will remain available in the Update Center until its EOL in December 2025, but will no longer be included with the CloudBees CI distributable. If you need to install it in an air-gapped environment, you must use a plugin catalog or Plugin management with Configuration as Code (CasC). If you need assistance, please contact CloudBees support.