Buildkite

““Developers don’t have to search or go to other teams for error information anymore,” says Seeders. “It’s just right there.””

““Previously, we had statically-defined groups of test suites that someone would have to manually rebalance when CI got too slow,” says Seeders. “Now, our CI system dynamically breaks up our tests into steps based on their average historical runtime such that they all complete within our target build time. It’s still running reliably, within our target, years later. This would not have been practical with our previous CI solution.””

““At the end of the day, we were able to significantly reduce our cloud infrastructure costs.””

““This allowed us to break things up into short, small steps and use spot VMs to reduce costs ,” Seeders says.”

““Designing the CI system we needed to meet our goals was so much easier once we moved to Buildkite,” says Seeders.”

““Investing in our existing system to make it more reliable or faster didn’t make sense for us,” says Brian Seeders, principal engineer at Elastic. “Buildkite provided the capabilities we needed to easily meet the requirements of the business, and so the age-old choice of build-versus-buy was an easy one. This has allowed us to focus our efforts on innovation rather than maintenance.””

“Having control over our most important build pipelines has enabled us to move really fast and really reliably. That kind of control has been transformative for our developer productivity and the ability to securely run pipelines for infrastructure as code.”

“But now with Buildkite “it’s trivial,” Bates said. “You click a button and it generates a pipeline, and it does all this dynamic magic. Teams just don’t think about it anymore.””

““The ability to bootstrap new services quickly is key for us so we can focus on delivering features, bug fixes, and improvements instead of repeating the same common setup and configuration steps for every service,” Bates said. “With Buildkite and a small amount of automation we’ve built ourselves, teams are able to go from a blank repo to a service running in production in a few minutes. This allows us to go from an idea to an MVP much quicker.””

““The hassle of managing the control plane is totally out of our hands,” Bates said of Buildkite. “We can set up our own secrets management, access to internal schedulers, and AWS and don’t have to have those secrets out on the cloud at large.””