Why is Buildkite Gaining Popularity as a CI Platform?

Hello subscribers, this week we will talk about Buildkite.

Continuous Integration (CI) is crucial for modern software development as it enhances code quality through automated testing and early bug detection, accelerates development cycles, and fosters better collaboration by ensuring a consistent codebase. It increases efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, reduces manual errors, and ensures reliable, stable releases with mechanisms for quick rollback if needed. CI/CD also provides immediate feedback to developers, supports scalability for large projects, and integrates compliance and security checks, thereby reducing risk. Ultimately, CI/CD leads to improved engineering productivity, higher software quality and in the end better customer satisfaction through frequent, high-quality updates.

Buildkite is a CI/CD platform used in software development and nowadays it has emerged as a popular choice among developers and organizations. It allows developers and organizations to automate the process of building, testing, and deploying code and enables companies to customize the CI platform for their enterprise needs.

There are several tech companies that all use Buildkite including Robinhood, Uber, Airbnb, Cruise, Shopify, and OpenAI among many other organizations. But why is Buildkite becoming a popular CI platform these days? What are the killer features that attract those companies? Let's explore the key factors contributing to Buildkite's growing adoption and why it stands out in the crowded CI market.

Note: there are several products provided by Buildkite. For this post, we will only focus on their Pipelines product.

Scalability

Buildkite's architecture enables easy scaling of build agents to handle increased workloads. And Buildkite handles dispatching of build jobs across multiple agents, improving speed and efficiency. It can handle large-scale projects and high-volume build requirements. The following is high level of Buildkite architecture:

For some of the success stories, Shopify, a global e-commerce giant supporting over 500,000 businesses and serving 100 million shoppers as of 2016, faced significant scaling challenges as they grew from 300 to 900 engineers across multiple time zones. Their previous CI solution couldn't keep up, resulting in 40-minute build times that needed drastic reduction. By adopting Buildkite, Shopify successfully scaled their infrastructure to run nearly 10,000 concurrent build agents, leveraging cloud cost optimizations and smoothly transitioning from AWS to Google Cloud. This move enabled them to maintain build times under 10 minutes despite a 300% growth in their engineering team. Buildkite's flexible architecture also allowed Shopify to apply these scaling benefits to their key mobile projects, ensuring consistent performance across their entire development ecosystem.

Developer Experience

Buildkite enhances developer experience by offering a YAML-based pipeline configuration for version-controlled, easily readable definitions, a local build runner for pre-commit testing, comprehensive build analytics and insights, rapid feedback loops with parallel execution and fail-fast mechanisms, customizable notifications integrated with popular communication tools, an extensive plugin ecosystem for easy tool integration, robust API and webhook support for custom solutions, an intuitive web interface with powerful monitoring capabilities, a feature-rich CLI for terminal enthusiasts, and thorough documentation backed by an active community, collectively streamlining CI/CD processes and significantly boosting developer productivity across diverse project requirements.

VCS Integration

Buildkite integrates seamlessly with various version control systems like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, as well as their on-premises installations. This compatibility is particularly valuable for companies with stringent security requirements, as it allows them to keep their code repositories within a secure, controlled environment. By supporting both cloud-based and on-premises versions of these popular version control systems, Buildkite ensures that organizations can choose the setup that best meets their security policies and compliance needs.

For enterprises that prefer to store their code on-premises due to regulatory constraints or internal security protocols, Buildkite’s ability to work with self-hosted instances of GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket provides a significant advantage. These companies can maintain full control over their code repositories, ensuring that sensitive information remains within their own infrastructure and under their direct management. This reduces the risk of data breaches and enhances the overall security posture of the organization.

Additionally, Buildkite’s integration with these version control systems streamlines the CI/CD process, making it easier for development teams to manage their workflows. Developers can trigger builds, run tests, and deploy applications directly from their version control system of choice, without having to compromise on security. This integration supports efficient collaboration and continuous integration practices while adhering to the company’s security requirements. Furthermore, Buildkite’s support for both cloud and on-premises installations ensures flexibility and scalability, allowing companies to adapt their CI/CD pipelines as their needs evolve. Whether a company starts with a cloud-based solution and later transitions to an on-premises setup, or vice versa, Buildkite can accommodate these changes seamlessly, providing a consistent and reliable CI/CD experience.

Overall, Buildkite’s comprehensive integration with various version control systems, including their on-premises versions, makes it an ideal solution for companies that need to balance robust security measures with efficient and scalable CI/CD workflows. This integration helps organizations maintain control over their code, meet compliance requirements, and support their development teams with powerful and flexible tools.

Extensibility and Customization

Users can extend CI functionality through various extension points supported by Buildkite. There are several extensions and customizations supported by Buildkite eg. Buildkite plugins, Buildkite Agents, Buildkite Artifacts, Dynamic Pipeline Upload.

Buildkite plugins is a feature that allows customers to extend their pipeline functionalities. One of the common Buildkite plugins is the docker buildkite plugin. It allows customers to encapsulate the build dependencies and tool chains within a container image by leveraging industry standards. Currently, there are over 500 plugins available in Github. It provides a rich set of choices for customers to choose from. The available plugins cover tasks such as testing, deployment, and code analysis and many other areas. On top of that, when needed, customers can also implement custom Buildkite plugins for their unique case.

Buildkite Agent is the installable binary that executes CI jobs in the cloud or on-prem environment. It allows developers and organizations to choose and customize their own preferred execution environment without being tied to a specific way of executing CI jobs. The Buildkite agent supports a set of predefined agent hooks at various points of CI jobs execution lifecycle. The hooks allow CI infrastructure developers to customize the execution environment before and after a CI job runs across different CI job lifecycles. The hook can inject environment variables, setting up credentials, caching source code or artifacts, upload logs, clean up the build environment and any other functionalities that are deemed reasonable and necessary by the organization.

Buildkite Artifacts, while it provides an out of the box storage location, which is the Buildkite’s own internal S3 bucket. It also allows CI infrastructure developers to define a standalone storage backend for storing the artifacts. There are several backends supported, eg. AWS S3, GCP GCS, Azure Blob Storage and Artifactory. This comes handy when customers don’t want to store the artifacts in the Buildkite’s default storage location, or want to do further processing after the artifacts are uploaded.

Cost-Effectiveness

Buildkite allows organizations to implement cost-effective CI processes. As a case study, Buildkite significantly helped Elastic reduces costs and improves developer productivity through several key features and improvements. By leveraging Buildkite’s unlimited concurrency, Elastic was able to parallelize tasks extensively and use spot VMs, which substantially lowered their cloud infrastructure expenses. The dynamic pipeline capability of Buildkite enabled Elastic to automatically split test suites based on their historical runtimes. This automation reduced the need for manual rebalancing of test suites, ensuring that all tests completed within the target build times and improving efficiency. As a result, Kibana's CI/CD pipeline run time was dramatically reduced from 3 hours to just 55 minutes. This substantial decrease in pipeline run time enabled quicker iteration cycles and faster feedback for developers, significantly boosting their productivity.

Furthermore, Buildkite’s developer-friendly UI streamlined CI error resolution by providing easy access to logs and other troubleshooting information. This reduced developers' reliance on other teams for error information and troubleshooting, allowing them to work more independently and efficiently. The improved CI system turned from the least-liked to the most-liked system in Elastic’s developer experience surveys. The migration to Buildkite was smooth, as many of the necessary functionalities were already built-in, reducing the effort required to re-implement existing pipeline files. This seamless transition allowed Elastic to focus on innovation and new feature development rather than maintaining and troubleshooting the old CI system. Overall, Buildkite provided Elastic with a scalable, cost-effective CI solution that enhanced developer productivity and supported the company’s growth and innovation goals.

Notifications

Buildkite integrates with various notification systems like Slack, Amazon EventBridge, and webhooks to provide comprehensive and real-time alerts about build statuses, which enhances communication and responsiveness among development teams. Through its Slack integration, Buildkite can send immediate notifications about build successes, failures, and other critical events directly to the relevant channels, ensuring that all team members are promptly informed and can take necessary actions without delay. This real-time communication helps in quickly addressing issues and maintaining the workflow.

With Amazon EventBridge integration, Buildkite can seamlessly connect with other AWS services and third-party applications, allowing for automated workflows and event-driven architectures. This integration enables the collection and analysis of build statistics, providing valuable insights into the CI/CD pipeline’s performance and helping teams optimize their processes. By leveraging EventBridge, teams can set up sophisticated event-driven triggers that respond to specific build events, further automating and enhancing the CI/CD pipeline.

Additionally, Buildkite’s support for webhooks allows for flexible and customizable notifications and integrations with a wide range of external systems and tools. Teams can configure webhooks to send detailed build information to custom endpoints, facilitating advanced data collection, logging, and monitoring. This enables precise estimation of build costs by aggregating data from various builds, helping teams manage and optimize their budgets effectively.

Overall, these integrations ensure that Buildkite provides a robust and flexible notification system that supports efficient communication, detailed analytics, and effective cost management, thereby enhancing the overall productivity and efficiency of development teams.

Comparing to other CI platforms

To better understand Buildkite’s strengths and how it compares to other popular CI/CD platforms like Travis CI, Travis CI Enterprise, GitHub Actions, let’s do some quick and high-level comparison of those CI platforms.

Summary

We went through several key features and benefits provided by Buildkite. We touched the points on scalability, developer experience, VCS integration, extensibility and customization, cost-effectiveness, and notifications. Overall we see that while Buildkite provides a set of features that allow the CI platform to work out of the box, it is extremely customizable on various aspects of the product. All of these worked out well to meet various CI platform requirements from different companies and industries, and all of these are the secret sauce of its popularity among developers and organizations.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment. Hope you enjoy this post.