Buildkite

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Buildkite
Buildkite Pty. Ltd.
FormerlyBuildbox
IndustryCI/CD
FoundedSeptember 3, 2013; 10 years ago (2013-09-03) in Melbourne, Australia
FounderKeith Pitt

Buildkite is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) platform used in DevOps and company was founded in September 2013. Companies using Buildkite include Wayfair, Shopify, Slack, Twilo, Canva, Pinterest, Envato, MYOB and Lyft.[1][2][3]

Company history[edit]

Buildkite Pty Ltd was founded in September 2013 as Buildbox, with the product out of beta in November.[4] [5] Tim Lucas came on board as a co-founder.[6] The original name of the company, Buildbox, had to be changed due to another company registering the trademark first, reportedly by only two weeks.[7]

In 2021, Buildkite ran its own CI/CD conference, Unblock, for the first time.[8][9]

In 2022, Tim Lucas stepped down as co-CEO.[10] They also announced a new tool, Test Analytics.[11][12] [13]

In 2023, the company makes their first acquisition, PackageCloud, from a private equity firm.[14] PackageCloud allows companies to store and distribute software to clients.[15]

Financing[edit]

In 2020, Buildkite raised $28M AUD, led by OpenView, with General Catalyst. The company was valued at 200M (AUD) in that deal.[3][2] In November 2022, the company raised a Series B round of $21M ($32M AUD), with investors including One Ventures, Dominic Pym (angel) and AirTree.[16][17] [18][19][3][9] Total funding investment at the time of writing is $39MUSD.

Products[edit]

Pipelines[edit]

Buildkite Pipelines, Buildkite's primary product, was built with a hybrid model where build agents are self-hosted, yet supported by a managed, cloud-powered interface. In the hybrid model, the customer provides their own infrastructure for running agents, including their secrets, while Pipelines has a web application to handle user authentication, build orchestration, store logs and metrics.[20][21][22][17][2][23][24] [25][26]

Features of Buildkite Pipelines include parallelized builds,[27][21] self-hosted agent infrastructure, build visualization, and integrations with services like GitHub,[28] Bitbucket, GitLab, and Slack.[29][23][30] Pipelines permits up to 10,000 agents per account for customers.[17]

The platform allows the creation of pipelines, which are the definitions (in YAML format) for entire automated build processes. A pipeline consists of individual steps, where each step defines an executable job that runs on one or more agents. Agents are the computers, virtual machines, or containerised infrastructure that provide the capabilities to execute these jobs.

An example of a pipeline YAML file, consisting of three steps[31]:

steps:
  - label: ":hammer: Tests"
    key: "tests"
    command: scripts/tests.sh
    env:
      BUILDKITE_DOCKER_COMPOSE_CONTAINER: app

  - label: ":package: Package"
    depends_on: "tests"
    command: scripts/build-binaries.sh
    artifact_paths: "pkg/*"
    env:
      BUILDKITE_DOCKER_COMPOSE_CONTAINER: app

  - label: ":debian: Publish"
    depends_on: "tests"
    command: scripts/build-debian-packages.sh
    artifact_paths: "deb/**/*"
    branches: "main"
    agents:
      queue: "deploy"

Test Analytics[edit]

Buildkite Test Analytics provides development teams with data about their test suites through metrics and trend analysis, and integrates with Buildkite Pipelines. Using the input data, Test Analytics identifies flaky tests, visualizes historical test performance, and correlates test runs with builds and deployments.

Test Analytics requires a test collector with a test suite that runs as a part of the pipelines definition. There is a Test Collector Buildkite plugin for JSON and Junit files, and some frameworks have specific test collectors, e.g. specific Javascript frameworks.[12][32]

The test collector gathers data about the test suite’s execution to report back to Test Analytics for visualization and interpretation through the web application. Data includes the performance and duration of tests, as well as the reliability (or flakiness) of tests.[12] [33][11]

Packages[edit]

At the time of writing, Packages is in beta/early access. It's marketed as an artifact and package management solution that "supports all major package formats", splits storage from orchestration for security, includes support of the Buildkite command line interface (CLI), among other features.[34] [35][36]

No public release date has been shared.

Components[edit]

Buildkite’s products consist of the following software components.

The Buildkite Web Application[edit]

The Buildkite web application is the software component and platform that provides the user interface to integrate Pipelines, Test Analytics and Packages. The web application provides the following features:

  • Pipeline orchestration
  • Build/queue metrics
  • Agent utilization
  • Test suites
  • Artifact/package management (beta)

Buildkite Agent[edit]

The agent is a small software component that runs natively on different operating system environments and provides the agent capabilities to run a pipeline’s jobs from Buildkite Pipelines. An agent also refers to the computer, virtual machine or containerised infrastructure running the Buildkite agent software component that provides the capabilities to run jobs from a pipeline.

Buildkite Test Collectors[edit]

The test collectors are other small software components that integrate with a pipeline’s jobs running test suites. A test collector analyzes the performance and reliability of tests run by a test suite and reports the data analytics back to Test Analytics, assuming the customer has that product enabled.

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Buildkite Announces Successful $32 Million Series B Funding Round | Startup News". 2022-11-17. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  2. ^ a b c Shu, Catherine (2020-08-18). "Melbourne-based CI/CD platform Buildkite gets $28 million AUD Series A led by OpenView". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  3. ^ a b c Waters, Cara (2020-08-18). "Software startup Buildkite scores $28 million investment". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  4. ^ "Good news everyone! Buildbox is now officially out of Beta". Buildkite. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  5. ^ Chan, Rosalie. "Profitable Australian DevOps startup Buildkite explains how its new $28 million in funding will let it spread the word about being 'the best-kept secret in the developer tool space'". Business Insider. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  6. ^ "'Quiet achiever' Buildkite raises $31m to expand operations". The West Australian. 2022-11-16. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  7. ^ "Startup Story: Buildkite". 2015-01-21. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  8. ^ "Announcing UnblockConf – Buildkite's first CI/CD conference". Buildkite. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  9. ^ a b Engineering, Wix (2021-10-24). "6 Challenges We Faced While Building a Super CI Pipeline: Part I". Wix Engineering. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  10. ^ "Bidding farewell to co-founder and co-CEO Tim Lucas". Buildkite. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  11. ^ a b "Test Analytics: Identify, track & fix problematic tests". Buildkite. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  12. ^ a b c "Integrate tests with Buildkite Test Analytics". DEV Community. 2022-06-26. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  13. ^ Vizard, Mike (2022-06-30). "Buildkite Adds Analytics Tools to Identify Flaky App Tests". DevOps.com. Retrieved 2024-02-09.
  14. ^ Bhartiya, Swapnil (2023-12-07). "Buildkite's CI/CD Platform Aims To Improve Developer Productivity And Happiness | Keith Pitt". TFiR | A video is worth a million words. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  15. ^ "Instacart IPO: The winners and losers". Fortune. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  16. ^ "We raised a $21m Series B! Now what do we do next?". Buildkite. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  17. ^ a b c Keary, Tim (2022-11-15). "How automation helps secure the CI/CD pipeline, Buildkite raises $21M". VentureBeat. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  18. ^ "Q&A with Keith Pitt — the Aussie CEO shaking up software development". SME Business Daily Media. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  19. ^ Palmer-Derrien, Stephanie (2020-08-19). "Software startup Buildkite rises from stealth mode with $28 million funding round". SmartCompany. Retrieved 2024-02-09.
  20. ^ Gerwitz, Ashley (2020-04-15). "Buildkite". Stark & Wayne. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  21. ^ a b Louden, Austin (Sep 1, 2017). "Continuous integration for iOS with Nix and Buildkite". Pinterest Engineering Blog. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  22. ^ "Buildkite | Euphemia". Buildkite | Euphemia. Retrieved 2024-02-09.
  23. ^ a b K, Likith (Mar 22, 2022). "Know How to Get Started with Buildkite". DEVOPS DONE RIGHT. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  24. ^ Botkin, Brinton. "Blazing Fast CI with Buildkite". Handshake. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  25. ^ Vestergaard, Rasmus; Lykke, Andreas (Oct 6, 2022). "uBuild: Fast and Safe Building of Thousands of Container Images". Uber. Retrieved Mar 28, 2024.
  26. ^ Ltd, Sentia Australia Pty. "Buildkite Brilliance: CI/CD on Android with Sentia's Expertise". Sentia. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  27. ^ DeWolf, Remy (August 16, 2023). "How Rippling used Spot instances to save and scale CI/CD". Rippling. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  28. ^ Hart, Eli (2021-07-12). "Better Android Testing at Airbnb, Part 7". The Airbnb Tech Blog. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  29. ^ Bharathi, Vishnu (Nov 23, 2021). "What we learnt by migrating from CircleCI to Buildkite". hasura.io. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  30. ^ Team, The Zenhub (2020-08-20). "ZenHub's move to Kubernetes". Zenhub | Agile Project Management Blog. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  31. ^ "Defining your pipeline steps". Buildkite. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  32. ^ buildkite/test-collector-javascript, Buildkite, 2024-03-05, retrieved 2024-03-27
  33. ^ Elisha, Anyalebechi (Jan 22, 2024). "20 Best Exploratory Testing Tools Reviewed For 2024". The QA Lead. Retrieved Mar 28, 2024.
  34. ^ "Buildkite September 2023 Release | A new Buildkite product". Buildkite. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  35. ^ "Buildkite Packages | Simple package management for all your artifacts". Buildkite. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  36. ^ "Buildkite Packages". Buildkite. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
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