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Taking Buildkite from a side project to a global company

(www.valleyofdoubt.com)
86 points shandsaker_au | 3 comments | 07 Sep 25 22:03 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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RainyDayTmrw ◴[08 Sep 25 18:04 UTC] No.45171663[source]▶
I evaluated Buildkite at a previous job, and I came to these conclusions.

1. Buildkite is probably the best commercial, off-the-shelf CI system right now, in terms of providing all the correct building blocks at the correct level of abstraction. 2. The impact of your CI system itself being good or bad is tiny in comparison to everything else in your end-to-end CI workflow. Far more important are your own CI scripts and what they run. A distant second is the observability tooling around your CI. 3. It's hard to justify the per-seat pricing of Buildkite, as a separate line item, when whatever CI offering your source control host bundles in will suffice.

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1. maccard ◴[08 Sep 25 18:58 UTC] No.45172348[source]▶
> the impact of your CI system itself being good or bad is tiny in comparison to everything in your end to end CI workflow.

I disagree here. A bad CI system makes it very, very easy to make the end to end workflow incredibly painful. Some small QOL features (buildkites input step was probably the reason it stuck for so long with us) are the difference between a tool being indistinguishable from others and being leaps and bounds ahead.

> it’s hard to justify the per seat pricing of buildkite

Buildkites pricing starts at 50% more than GitHub enterprise does. I couldn’t justify it as someone who loves buildkite and is in charge of making those decisions.

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2. RainyDayTmrw ◴[08 Sep 25 19:07 UTC] No.45172476[source]▶
In most enterprises, the choice isn't Github vs Buildkite, it's Github vs Github plus Buildkite. That's what makes it so hard to pay for a separate CI vendor that costs more, when your source code hosting vendor already bundles one, as good or as bad as it might be.
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3. maccard ◴[08 Sep 25 19:57 UTC] No.45173144[source]▶
Sorry - I agree with you entirely.