Announcing the Buildkite Agent Stack for Kubernetes

Published on March 28, 2023

Buildkite is one of the most popular CI/CD services in the world. Developers love it for the speed, security, scalability, and control it provides. But until now, it’s been an undiscovered resource in the Kubernetes community. Buildkite has partnered with SuperOrbital to change that and today we’re proud to announce the launch of the official Buildkite Kubernetes Agent Stack.

Our team at SuperOrbital worked with Buildkite engineers and some of their biggest customers to draw on existing work in the design and implementation of this agent stack. By working closely with Buildkite customers, we have been able to produce a simple solution that will be immediately familiar to Kubernetes users. And, importantly for a community-focused company like Buildkite, the work was done in the open and licensed under the FOO open source license.

Agent Stack Design

We’re proud to be able to deliver a truly Kubernetes-native solution.

Buildkite jobs can now be seamlessly converted into Kubernetes jobs allowing the Kubernetes API server to manage the lifecycle of the workload. This puts the broad capabilities of the Kubernetes ecosystem to scale, bin-pack, and secure these workloads to work for your build tasks. Teams can now use the same compute platform for their production and platform engineering workloads with a supported first party solution.

Our approach preserves access to a large percentage of the Buildkite plugin ecosystem by using a shared file system inside a multi-container pod for each job. This design also enables the scheduler to leverage the log collection, process handling, and artifact management capabilities built into the agent binary.

Keep an eye out here and on the Buildkite site for more technical information about the agent stack.

Buildkite ❤️ Kubernetes

The community around Buildkite is filled with enthusiastic engineering teams building innovative software. Our team at SuperOrbital is excited to see how this project evolves as real world CI/CD use cases on Kubernetes drive enhancements to this agent stack!

Check out the agent stack on Github!