On the Radar: Buildkite, continuous integration at scale for security-conscious enterprises

Summary

Catalyst

The continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) market has evolved dramatically over the past decade, shaped by the growing scale and complexity of the cloud, microservices, and open source era. Buildkite has recognized the opportunities in combining open source and closed source technologies, creating a product that brings together the strengths of both. Appealing to enterprises that seek scalability, adaptability, security, and more, Buildkite offers open source features and hybrid environments with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) control plane that gives customers flexibility and control over their security environment. In so doing, Buildkite has successfully navigated the market to become a leading enterprise continuous integration solution.

Omdia view

A key component of software delivery is the CI/CD pipeline, and the market for this is largely dominated by open source solutions. Many of these are cloud-based SaaS offerings that are part of a broader service. For enterprises that prefer to keep their IP protected by keeping the deployment of applications on-premises or on private clouds, this immediately restricts the choice of CI/CD tools. Most of those that can be installed on-premises and on private clouds can be challenging to scale out, which is a problem for enterprises with internet-scale deployments to manage. This is the sweet spot where Buildkite offers its solution. Its platform control plane is SaaS based, but its open source agents reside on the customer’s infrastructure, so the customer has full control over its own data and code. Moreover, the Buildkite control plane has practically no limit to the number of agents it can manage, so customers can create, for example, 100,000 parallel jobs to satisfy the largest internet-scale demands.