Buildkite and AWS clear the way to blue-sky thinking for developers

What began as a pet project in 2012 has evolved into an enterprise-grade software company powering some of the world’s most influential companies such as Shopify, REA Group, and Intercom. Over the last decade, the need for efficient and reliable build, test, and deployment processes has only intensified—developers are under immense pressure to rapidly iterate on code while minimizing risk. Yet complex delivery cycles with multiple manual steps continue to be at odds with demand, and often they lead to errors. 

No matter where developers are located, they need intuitive tools to help them drive impact quickly. Likewise, organizations need to offer a range of effective tools to deliver a strong employee experience and retain top talent. This all starts by getting under the skin of what each business and their teams want to achieve. 

As a fully remote business, Buildkite fundamentally believes that the right workplace technology can nurture purposeful and rewarding culture. And by building intuitive tools that their own teams and customers really want to use, they are paving the way for more agile approaches to software development. Having successfully delivered a product that streamlines software delivery cycles and maximizes productivity, Buildkite now supports engineering teams around the world.

Facilitating constant and rapid learning is fundamental to how Buildkite helps companies create a competitive advantage. With fast feedback loops, developers can tap into opportunities across workflows without missing a beat, improving everything from shipping to testing and iterating. 

This approach is growing more valuable as generative AI develops at breakneck speed, inundating developers with code and calling for more accurate and scalable processes to ensure they don’t fall behind. Ultimately, Buildkite acts as a quality assurance software to give customers the green or red light on whether they should take code into production. Once users are confident, production can be scaled through automation to reduce the risk of errors. 

The benefits for businesses are clear, including dramatic reductions in the time taken to test, build, and set up teams, faster incident resolutions, and greater control over pipelines. For example, they’ve helped Shopify cut build times from 40 minutes to just 10 minutes even in the face of 300% growth in their global engineering team. Since 2015, Buildkite has been critical to scaling Shopify’s operations to meet their teams’ peak demand all while reducing costs.

With usage ramping up and a predominantly digitally-native customer base, a technology stack that can handle unpredictable spikes in workloads is crucial to Buildkite’s success. Activity typically surges in the lead up to events such as Black Friday but then drops significantly during code freezes. When capacity planning isn’t an option, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides the substantial computing power and storage needed to scale on demand that wouldn’t be possible on-premises. 

"Our customers can be running 100,000 parallel workflows one day and 12 million the next. We needed a stack that could go from zero to a million instances in seconds," Pitt explains. 

Buildkite has been using a range of AWS services for over a decade, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Fargate, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon ElastiCache. Beyond satisfying the need for scale, AWS expert support has also helped them maintain watertight security and a resilient delivery pipeline for their customers. With a global distributed workforce, this is a priority as they look to continue strengthening the security of tooling for millions of remote workers.

Looking ahead, AWS is at the heart of Buildkite’s plan to keep executing against its mission to unblock software developers thanks to the speed, scale, and specialist compute that wouldn’t be possible without the partnership. As Pitt says, “You can’t guess your future, but you can build it.” While AI-generated code will make their job more challenging due to the sheer volume of code to test, package, and deploy, their robust technology stack puts them in a great position to successfully shape new developments. By diving deep into developers’ evolving pain points and leveraging the latest technologies from AWS, Buildkite is well-positioned to power the change to a software-driven world. 

Learn more about how AWS gives your software or technology company the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale. Contact us now to get started.