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A break from blogging

The need for CICD

As a one-man operation maintaining 3 physical servers running VMs each hosting a number of jailed (containers) services, executing changes often involves re-reading the steps and taking slow steps.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CICD) is a form of automation that scales; I have been Product Manager for Engineering Excellence overseeing its benefits from front-end to back-end development, to data engineering, through to back-end operations. It's easily repeatable and transparent in execution.

Discovering Buildkite

Buildkite was the CICD platform choice in one of the companies in my career journey. I've seen it scale to over 20,000 deploys monthly. And it's free for non-commercial, one-man operation. The only ask is that one sponsors agent instances as part of the installation; this is actually a good thing from a privacy perspective.

What worked for me

  1. A gentler learning curve. Buildkite's web UI is not as clunky as Jenkins. Building a simple pipeline can be done via it's web-based interface. As my confidence grew I was able to explore advanced pipeline config into files as part of my app repositories in GitHub.
  2. Simple agent installs. Installing stuff on FreeBSD usually comes with the risk that documentation for the OS is not as forthcoming. Buildkite has excellent documentation for FreeBSD (and Debian) that works with minimal complexities.
  3. Great documentation. Everything I learnt came off the official documentation.

What didn't work for me

  1. Logging challenges. The Debian agent will crash regularly and I wasn't able to figure out how to find the logs to troubleshoot. FreeBSD agents have been very stable though. I should try another Debian agent install if this is repeatable.
  2. GitHub repository access management. Initially I set per-repository access by Buildkite. Buildkite seems to take a long time to sync up on changes to the access. Maybe my interpretation of the Buildkite web UI was not aligned to the expected use case (long way of saying I understand the UI wrong). Eventually I switched to all-repo access to quickly build pipelines to new repos.

Conclusion

Buildkite combined with Ansible makes for a very competent CICD platform for medium and large enterprises. Caveat: my personal experience is limited to Jenkins and Concourse as comparison.