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Tag: Buildkite

Buildkite Launches Integrated Platform to Manage DevOps Workflows at Scale

Buildkite Pty Ltd today launched a Scale-Out Delivery Platform that combines multiple previous DevOps tools into a single integrated platform.

In addition to the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform the company developed, the Scale-Out Delivery Platform includes Buildkite Test Engine, Buildkite Package Registries and Buildkite Mobile Delivery Cloud.

Buildkite CEO Keith Pitt said the iteration of the DevOps platform will make it simpler for organizations to implement best practices by eliminating the need to separately install and configure additional tools.

The Buildkite platform is designed to enable DevOps teams to take advantage of a concurrency capability that enables them to run 100 times as many agents and workflows as other platforms, said Pitt. At the core of that proprietary platform is a cloud-based service that enables DevOps teams to self-host customizable open source agents.

That approach makes it possible to efficiently process thousands of daily commits across massive codebases as they see fit, while also ensuring proprietary code and secrets are not made accessible to third parties, including Buildkite.

Organizations such as Airbnb, Block, Canva, Cruise, Culture Amp, Elastic, Lyft, PagerDuty, Pinterest, PlanetScale, Rippling, Shopify, Slack, Tinder, Twilio, Uber and Wayfair all opt to pay for that capability rather than rely on an open source platform because it enables them to build, deploy and update applications at scale, he added. In fact, organizations that rely on antiquated platforms for building software are essentially telling their application developers that they don’t view application development as a key business differentiator, noted Pitt.

Successful organizations are now moving beyond the CI/CD fundamentals to leverage integrated DevOps platforms that dramatically increase both productivity and the quality of the code created, said Pitt, Those organizations, for example, don’t allow flaky tests that waste precious cycles to run at all, he noted.

As the volume of code being generated in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI) continues to increase, it’s only a matter of time before legacy DevOps platforms will collapse under the strain, said Pitt.

It’s not clear to what degree DevOps teams are currently evaluating the platforms and tools they employ but as they, for example, embrace platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps at scale they are naturally considering their options. Organizations that appreciate the degree to which they are dependent on software to remain competitive also have an increased appreciation for the need to ensure that only software of the highest quality gets deployed in production environments. Organizations that are serious about software development are also run by DevOps leaders that regularly “walk the manufacturing floor” to ensure there are no defects and that any changes made to existing applications are done safely, noted Pitt.

No two organizations, of course, have embraced DevOps workflows to the same degree, but just about all are looking to continuously evolve and improve. Of course, achieving that goal might be easier to achieve once AI agents begin to automate tasks in a way that eliminates many of the bottlenecks that today conspire to slow down the pace of application development.

The issue, as always, is making sure that, whatever the next advance, the underlying DevOps platform being depended upon is actually up to the challenge.

October 9, 2024
Buildkite Acquires Packagecloud to Streamline DevOps Workflows

Buildkite Pty Ltd today revealed it has acquired Packagecloud as part of an effort to tightly integrate package management tools with its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

Buildkite CEO Keith Pitt said the goal is to reduce the level of friction that exists between providers of third-party package management tools and CI/CD platforms that DevOps teams are today required to address themselves.

There is no shortage of package management tools used to configure, install and update software, but the level of integration between these tools and CI/CD platforms has not historically been very high. The acquisition of Packagecloud will result in a package manager becoming a first-class citizen within the context of a CI/CD platform, said Pitt.

Buildkite will maintain the existing support Packagecloud provides for platforms such as Jenkins, but the acquisition will streamline DevOps workflows and improve overall developer productivity, he added.

In the months ahead, Buildkite will also add a range of tools to better enable DevOps teams to achieve that goal, said Pitt. In addition, the company plans to add tools to streamline the management of compliance processes as regulations pertaining to application development are becoming more stringent, he added.

It’s not clear how much IT organizations are reevaluating their CI/CD platforms to improve developer productivity, but platform engineering as a methodology to centralize the management of DevOps workflows is gaining traction. Those efforts promise to reduce the total cost of implementing DevOps at scale and improve developer productivity by making the scaffolding required to build applications more readily accessible. Today, too many developers are spending time managing developer environments rather than writing actual code.

The challenge, of course, is convincing developers—who tend to jealously guard their tool prerogatives—to embrace a platform engineering methodology and cede control over the development environment to a centralized team.

One way or another, developer productivity needs to improve as more organizations encounter economic headwinds. Developers are the most expensive resource any organization has, so improving the rate at which high-quality code is created will always be imperative, noted Pitt.

Today, organizations depend on software to drive revenue. Investors are assessing senior leaders within those organizations on their ability to deliver quality software in a timely fashion. Each new application and subsequent software update now has a direct impact on the profitability of the organization. As such, tolerance for legacy approaches to building software that require more time and effort is dropping.

The issue, as always, is that switching from one software development platform to another is an expensive proposition, so many organizations may find themselves supporting a mix of legacy and modern platforms. The challenge becomes defining the pace at which that migration occurs as new applications are created and legacy applications are continuously updated.

September 19, 2023
Buildkite Adds Analytics Tools to Identify Flaky App Tests

Buildkite has added an analytics tool to its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that identifies flaky tests.

Buildkite’s co-CEO Keith Pitt said the company’s Test Analytics tool enables continuous performance monitoring and real-time insights for test suites that, when not properly written, only serve to waste DevOps teams’ time. Rather than eliminating those tests, most DevOps teams just opt to run them again on the assumption that the code they are testing will eventually pass because the test is poorly constructed, noted Pitt.

Buildkite reports there are more than 800 million seconds—or the equivalent of 25 years—of flaky tests manually re-run on its platform by developers each month.

In addition to being integrated with the Buildkite CI/CD platform, the Test Analytics tool can also be applied to tests residing in CI platforms such as CircleCI, GitHub Actions and Jenkins.

Test Analytics includes a dashboard that identifies the slowest and least reliable tests to help prioritize test remediation efforts. Historical views and trend graphs are also available to provide further insight into recurring issues.

DevOps teams can also take advantage of user-defined thresholds to define whether a test is slow or unreliable, which generate custom alerts when discovered. Finally, there are integrations with commonly used testing frameworks to determine where tests are, for example, wasting time running database queries against application programming interfaces (APIs) that have timed out.

Pitt noted that most tests today are created by developers and software engineers rather than dedicated testing teams. As such, the chances there will be an issue with a test that is returning flaky results are high.

Organizations are, of course, trying to determine how far left to shift application testing. Developers can write their own tests, but how thorough and objective those tests are is debatable. There are also certain tests that should be applied to all applications that organizations can embed within their DevOps workflows to make sure they are always run.

Obviously, the more testing that occurs the fewer issues DevOps teams will encounter after an application is deployed. However, when tests are flaky, it becomes easier for developers to justify not running them even though that test might still surface an issue they should address. In addition to increasing confidence in the quality of those tests, knowing which tests are flaky allows a DevOps team to determine which tests should be run first. That’s critical at a time when more organizations are trying to increase developer productivity; that productivity is often adversely impacted by waiting for tests to be completed before more code can be written.

Eventually, the overall quality of tests should improve as machine learning algorithms and other forms of data science are applied. In the meantime, however, the onus for improving application testing is clearly on the engineers that create them. The challenge is many of those engineers may not even be aware how flaky a test really is until someone shows them some empirical data that can’t be disputed.

June 30, 2022