Worth being upfront with, I'm an employee, but; Buildkite.
Frontier labs and global saas heavyweights run CI through us, plus a crop of open source tooling like Bazel, vLLM, Firecracker, Rails, Ray, Sorbet and Rust.
Shopify, Uber, Airbnb, Canva stresstested the platform ten years ago for scaling issues.
You need to take a little time to design upfront and take advantage of dynamically programmable primitives. It isn't the same ease/convenience as Actions. Bit more available though.
How would I be able to run my CI via Buildkite when I still host in GitHub and their API is down? We are currently already using self-hosted runners and they also don't work because either they aren't started by GitHub or can't download the code.
We ran a mirror of our git repo on codecommit when things started to get really hairy, and pointed out CI to that instead of GitHub. It’s still a moving target though as we were using GitHub releases to publish to. We replaced that with an s3 bucket and mirrored _those_ to GH via actions, which had the added benefit of only failing when GitHub was down!
I want to second build kite - it’s an excellent piece of tech and is best described as “sane Jenkins” as a compliment. My only gripe is the pricing - it’s not designed for “small teams”. But I’d use it again in a heartbeat.
This week we've released a free plan and overhauled the mid-tier; am keen to hear whether this alleviates the 'small team' pain against others in market
I’m not working for a small team anymore but I can say this would have gotten us to use Buildkite again.
I think an in between tier would help, as it’s 4.5x the cost of GitHub per person, plus the cost of the runners. The idea of spending $42/mo on GitHub plus $180 on buuldkite is a hard sell, but the economics aren’t there.
That's good feedback, there's been a lot of discussion internally about how pricing has affected sentiment and what the trade-offs were from previous decision makers there over the last couple of years. Without it seeming like lip service, there is a 'startup' plan in the works, to sit between free and pro, sounds like it may be the right move as this isn't the first time we've heard it.
"The winners of the next decade won't build a better pull request. They'll build the infrastructure that makes software generation, validation, and deployment operate at machine scale."
This is funny, as all the listed primitives and this scale of reliable build infra is the exact shape of Buildkite.
Another option is Buildkite with hybrid architecture... Your hardware, our control plane, managed through GUI or CLI. Instant agent push, run up to over 100k concurrent agents, fan out jobs, generate pipelines at runtime...
Apologies for shameless plug... have you considered Buildkite? Our statuspage is a sea of green even as we hit 1.3b minutes/wk (GHA sits at 2.1/wk now). Much less maintenance overhead than Jenkins, more dynamic featureset. The trial is all-access, unlocks the full product and can be extended past 30 days. Real human eng on standby throughout.
VP at Buildkite here; let me know if you need anything as you begin to move over to us for orchestration. The new trial we just released unlocks everything in the platform, and we can extend past 30 days if you need.
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