Migrate team controllers to managed controllers using Move/Copy/Promote

3 minute readKnowledge base

Issue

CloudBees CI Teams on the operations center are reaching end-of-life, and I want to migrate existing Team controllers to Managed controllers.

Starting with the July 2026 CloudBees CI release, Blue Ocean and team controllers will reach end-of-life (EOL) and will no longer be supported. After this date, Blue Ocean and team controllers will not receive updates, security patches, or technical support and will be removed from the CloudBees Assurance Program (CAP).

What this means for you:

  • Team controllers will cease to function starting with the July 2026 release.

  • Blue Ocean may continue to work, but is no longer supported by CloudBees.

  • No further updates or security patches will be provided.

  • Technical support for Blue Ocean and team controllers will no longer be available.

CloudBees strongly encourages all customers to complete their migration away from team controllers before the EOL date to ensure uninterrupted service. For detailed migration guidance, please refer to In-place conversion of team controllers to managed controllers. If you have questions or need assistance, please contact CloudBees Support.

CloudBees recommends using Move/Copy/Promote to migrate team controllers to managed controllers. An in-place migration is also available to convert team controllers to managed controllers. For more details, refer to In-place conversion of team controllers to managed controllers.

Resolution

To migrate team controller jobs to a new managed controller, use Move/Copy/Promote to copy jobs and Pipelines.

Although this guide points to Move and Copy as equivalent methods of migration, it is strongly recommended to use Copy, so a version of the original item is always available as a recovery backup.

Even after a successful migration, the original controller should be retained for validation and recovery purposes. The migration involves manual steps, so having the original controller available makes it easier to recover any missed items, such as credentials or global configuration. The CloudBees Backup plugin can help you retain a full backup of the original controller.

Before starting the migration

The starting point is a CloudBees CI cluster where a team controller (to be migrated) is connected to the operations center. A new managed controller has been created in the same cluster and is connected to the same operations center.

Verify that the managed controller has the same plugins installed as the team controller. The Move or Copy dialog displays a warning if any are missing.

Migrate credentials

Pipelines often use peripheral data (such as credentials, shared libraries, and tools configuration) which is outside the Pipeline definition itself, so a different migration process is required for the migration of this data.

Pipelines often use credentials defined in CloudBees CI. You must migrate those credentials separately, unless they are defined in the folder containing the Pipelines.

  • Folder-scoped credentials: No action required; the Move/Copy operation handles these automatically.

  • CloudBees CI (top-level) scoped credentials: You must manually migrate them. Either recreate them in the folder before moving or copying it, or recreate them in the managed controller.

Migrate Pipelines

Use Move/Copy/Promote to move Pipelines to the appropriate folders associated with the target managed controller.

Migrate global configuration

You must manually migrate any CloudBees CI global configuration that affects Pipeline execution (for example, anything under Manage Jenkins). This includes Tools Configuration (for example, Maven and JDK) and Configure System settings (for example, global GitHub or Bitbucket configurations).

Post-migration steps

If you use a Configuration as Code bundle to manage controller items on the operations center, you must update the bundle to remove any Blue Steel-specific properties after uninstalling the Blue Steel plugins from the operations center. For example, remove connectedMasterTeamProperty from controller item definitions. Leaving these properties in place after the plugins are removed can cause bundle validation or controller provisioning to fail.

This article is part of our Knowledge Base and is provided for guidance-based purposes only. The solutions or workarounds described here are not officially supported by CloudBees and may not be applicable in all environments. Use at your own discretion, and test changes in a safe environment before applying them to production systems.