Portable and Secure CI/CD for COBOL: Lessons from an Industrial Migration
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866917377598291968 |
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| author | Askholm, Andreas Johnsen, Kenneth Mauro, Jacopo |
| author_facet | Askholm, Andreas Johnsen, Kenneth Mauro, Jacopo |
| contents | Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are critical for sustaining the evolution of large software systems. In regulated industries with legacy technologies, however, pipelines themselves can become a source of technical debt. This paper presents an industrial case study of Bankdata, a cooperative IT provider for Danish banks, where a Jenkins-based COBOL CI/CD pipeline had grown fragile, slow, and tightly coupled to platform-specific logic. The original architecture relied on Groovy scripts spread across four repositories with runtime dependency installation, leading to long execution times, high maintenance costs, and vendor lock-in.
We report on the migration to a containerized architecture featuring an abstraction layer for platform logic, simplified repository structure, and a pre-built OCI-compliant image containing COBOL tools and dependencies. The new design achieved an 82% runtime reduction. Our experience highlights lessons on abstraction, containerization, and organizational adoption, offering guidance for modernizing pipelines in legacy, high-security environments. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_00936 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Portable and Secure CI/CD for COBOL: Lessons from an Industrial Migration Askholm, Andreas Johnsen, Kenneth Mauro, Jacopo Software Engineering Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are critical for sustaining the evolution of large software systems. In regulated industries with legacy technologies, however, pipelines themselves can become a source of technical debt. This paper presents an industrial case study of Bankdata, a cooperative IT provider for Danish banks, where a Jenkins-based COBOL CI/CD pipeline had grown fragile, slow, and tightly coupled to platform-specific logic. The original architecture relied on Groovy scripts spread across four repositories with runtime dependency installation, leading to long execution times, high maintenance costs, and vendor lock-in. We report on the migration to a containerized architecture featuring an abstraction layer for platform logic, simplified repository structure, and a pre-built OCI-compliant image containing COBOL tools and dependencies. The new design achieved an 82% runtime reduction. Our experience highlights lessons on abstraction, containerization, and organizational adoption, offering guidance for modernizing pipelines in legacy, high-security environments. |
| title | Portable and Secure CI/CD for COBOL: Lessons from an Industrial Migration |
| topic | Software Engineering |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00936 |