An easy-to- deploy platform that makes shifting code from the development branch to the testing branch easy
What is our primary use case?
There are two major purposes for Buildkite in my job role. Firstly, I use it for the release of transcripts and managing deployments, including unblocking and blocking them. Secondly, I also run automation integration tests on different branches.
I mainly use what has been set up by our team members and haven't explored the details myself.
What is most valuable?
Buildkite makes it easier to conduct deployment. When I merge a PR in Buildkite, it automatically starts the deployment process. It used to be challenging to shift code from the development branch to the testing branch because I had to follow up with multiple developers. Previously, I was dependent on the DevOps team and developers to handle deployments, but now it allows me to deploy the solutions myself. This has made it much easier for me to handle both non-production and production environments.
What needs improvement?
Buildkite has issues while creating or extending branches as only the first five builds in the user-interface can be accessed and post that one has to access the next builds by remembering branch names without pagination which can be inconvenient.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Buildkite for the past four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Buildkite has been stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Buildkite is scalable but it has an issue while creating or extending branches. I can only access the first five builds in the user interface, post creation. After those, I need to search for the next builds by remembering branch names without pagination which can be inconvenient. However, the scalability hasn't negatively affected my work processes.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I find Buildkite cost-effective as it has definitely increased my productivity, especially on the deployment side. It saved a lot of my time and improved data management because I can handle different environments myself now.
What other advice do I have?
There were no issues faced during the integration. We've integrated unit test coverage results into Buildkite, which provides detailed information about their status. Our automation pipeline is also integrated with Buildkite, allowing us to see clear logs and track the progress of each step.
My advice to others considering Buildkite is to use the solution. It is a good solution for the release managers and developers. Overall, I would rate Buildkite nine out of ten.
Provides secure, isolated environments for development and testing and offers detailed logging
What is our primary use case?
I work with Solenopsis, a Salesforce test automation tool. We integrate with various tools depending on the customer's requirements.
If a customer uses Buildkite, we demonstrate how it integrates with Solenopsis for their CI/CD pipelines. The same applies to other tools like TeamCity and BuildGuard. I've used these tools to meet specific customer needs.
So, it's mainly used for automated pipelines. For the CI/CD side. It may have other features, but I've only explored it for this purpose.
It runs test execution and other tasks within Docker containers. It utilizes Docker internally.
What is most valuable?
The best thing isn't specific to Buildkite. Most tools offer similar features: they're cloud-based, making them easy to use; you have your own private space to work; and the UI is user-friendly.
Buildkite's UI is particularly intuitive, making it simple to add steps to your pipeline. It also provides detailed logging.
What needs improvement?
Compared to market leaders like Azure DevOps and Jenkins, Buildkite's community is smaller, but they do have some documentation.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In terms of stability, I didn't notice any bugs. My test executions ran smoothly. I'm not sure how well it handles lengthy applications, like eight or nine hours long, as I don't have that data. Otherwise, I didn't see any issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Buildkite isn't as widely used as Azure DevOps. I only used it for two customers.
How are customer service and support?
I didn't need a technical support team. The information I needed was readily available on the web. The UI is easy to understand.
How was the initial setup?
Buildkite itself is a cloud-based solution. I created a pipeline in one of my repositories for a project. The project is fetched from Git, and a pipeline is built around it for test execution. That's how I used Buildkite.
I haven't used Buildkite for application deployment. I used Buildkite to run my test execution. My customer used Buildkite and wanted to run tests on their hosted agents, which are similar to Docker containers. Most tools offer this functionality, like Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and Bitbucket.
Buildkite's UI is better than some others, but I mainly used it to trigger test execution and build automation on their hosted agents.
What other advice do I have?
I suggest exploring other options as well, as your requirements might be met by another product. I'm not sure about their licensing costs since I used it for customers who already had it.
My tasks weren't complex, and Buildkite's UI made it easy. My advice is to analyze your requirements, determine how you want to use Buildkite, and compare it with other products on the market. It's possible that its licensing cost is higher than others.
It is easy to learn Buildkite.
Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. I was able to achieve what I needed, and the documentation was helpful. My requirements weren't complex. I can't give it a higher rating because I don't know enough about its community or market presence. Feature-wise, it was good enough for me.
Reimagining our CI/CD workflow with Buildkite
What do you like best about the product?
The platform and API documentation are stellar; kudos to the GraphQL explorer as well!
Utilizing clusters and having a webhook and notification service built into the platform has eased some previous pain we've experienced.
The web UI and UX are very intuitive, and pairing them with the amazing docs makes for a pleasant product introduction.
What do you dislike about the product?
Mostly a personal gripe; creating a YAML pipeline doesn't feel great when done through the API.
More specifically, the configuration field in the payload is very clunky and difficult to interface with as a human.
(I know the intention is for it to be done programmatically as an API, but it felt worth calling out)
Another nit-picky thing I've noticed is that certain values that go into a build's meta_data are casted in the response/event notification payloads. (int -> string)
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Being a vendored and managed service, Buildkite alleviates the pains of CI platform maintenance, helping us spend more time on things that matter more.
Buildkite the tool and company helped us achieve our CI consolidation
What do you like best about the product?
We achieved most of our goals in consolidating to a central, zero-trust, code-driven CICD platform using Buildkite. The tools and APIs are simple, well-considered components that we can compose into a wide variety of pipelines to suit our business. The company was responsive to all our initial questions, integration work and continues to support our users and our automated build and deploy requirements.
What do you dislike about the product?
A minor inconvenience is the granularity of permissions and interface, which stops us from achieving self-administration for our dev teams. We still require full-org administrators for some tasks - notably, Notifications.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We required a central, third-party orchestrator for our CICD processes that helps us deploy our own build infrastructure (agents), has little or no access to our credentials and secrets, can be code-driven, provides appropriate user-directory integration, and so-on. We were able to achieve this with Buildkite.
Easy to deploy our webapp with BuildKite!
What do you like best about the product?
Works great once everything was hooked up - as a web developer I never really had to worry much about the server or infrastructure deployment commands, even when BuildKite was firing off a chain of multiple tools that included our build, containerization and putting it into Kubernetes.
What do you dislike about the product?
It took a while for me to grok, mostly because our internal setup was quite complex, so there were quite a few steps required. I eventually overcame and was able to keep our web app updated on my own mostly.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Having a repeatable way to deploy my webapp without needing ops support. In the event of a problem, I could debug my side of the code, while ops had context from other app environments to help with fixes. That facilitated easy communication and separation of concerns between the teams.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
It seems to make it easy on the actual people running the operational side of things.
A powerful Swiss Army knife for CI
What do you like best about the product?
Buildkite balances the right abstraction level for CI in a way that allows for simple pipelines all the way up to quite complex workflows to be constructed simply. Unlike other CI services, Buildkite's YAML-based pipeline config is comprised of only 5 different step types (run command, wait for commands, block for approval, ask for user input, and trigger another pipeline) that are composable. This makes it simple for teammates to understand and configure pipelines without having to learn very complex syntaxes.
Buildkite's runner agent is self-hosted, which allows us to run builds within our infrastructure, including custom IAM role access to our environments, in a way that's more secure than giving the CI service a static access key and secret.
What do you dislike about the product?
Since Buildkite's agent that runs builds is self-hosted, there is some initial work required to set up an agent cluster. Buildkite provides an AWS-based preset, as well as a Kubernetes Helm chart, so this isn't too much of a hassle, but it requires more setup than fully-hosted CI services. This is both a plus and a minus though (see above), as we are in full control of the environment the agent runs in.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use Buildkite to construct customized CI pipelines that run inside our infrastructure clusters - where other services like Circle CI or GitHub Actions primarily run inside the vendor's hosting environment, fully managed, with Buildkite we can run deploys inside AWS or inside Kubernetes. This allows us to control the access a build has to that infrastructure via IAM roles or Kubernetes service accounts in a very secure way.
We also use Buildkite to construct a CI/CD system for Terraform. Buildkite has certain building blocks (control over global concurrency for a job type, the ability to block for user approval) that make it possible to create a safe pipeline for applying Terraform changes, with coordinated planned changes, approval requests, and a serial deploy queue.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Buildkite is awesome if you either need to self-host your CI job runners, or you are willing to set up a self-hosted job runner. It provides a lot of power using simple building blocks behind a slick UI, so once the agents are running, it's often easier to work with than other CI services.
