Case Study: Markel achieves scalable, self-service cloud DevOps with CloudBees CI and Kubernetes

The Role of CloudBees CI and Kubernetes in Moving DevOps to the Cloud

Markel, a global specialty insurance firm with roughly 2,000 IT staff across 58 offices in 17 countries, faced a sprawling on‑prem DevOps landscape after centralizing build automation on Jenkins. Under Gurushyam Mony’s direction the team grew to support 22,000 pipelines on a 19‑node Jenkins farm but became overwhelmed by integrations, inconsistent logs, poor visibility and limited capacity, making it impossible to scale or maintain consistent DevOps practices.

Markel piloted CloudBees CI on Azure Kubernetes Service in April 2020, using CloudBees training, dojos and an “air lift” strategy plus blueprints to move teams to a self‑service, containerized platform. The move cut a representative build from 25 minutes to 4 minutes, saved thousands of developer hours, delivered real‑time visibility and predictive scaling, and accelerated enterprise adoption of a modern, cloud‑native CI/CD standard.

Markel

Gurushyam Mony

Director, DevOps and Quality Engineering