DiscoverKubeFMScaling CI horizontally with Buildkite, Kubernetes, and multiple pipelines, with Ben Poland
Scaling CI horizontally with Buildkite, Kubernetes, and multiple pipelines, with Ben Poland

Scaling CI horizontally with Buildkite, Kubernetes, and multiple pipelines, with Ben Poland

Update: 2025-09-30
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Description

Ben Poland walks through Faire's complete CI transformation, from a single Jenkins instance struggling with thousands of lines of Groovy to a distributed Buildkite system running across multiple Kubernetes clusters.

He details the technical challenges of running CI workloads at scale, including API rate limiting, etcd pressure points, and the trade-offs of splitting monolithic pipelines into service-scoped ones.

You will learn:

  • How to architect CI systems that match team ownership and eliminate shared failure points across services

  • Kubernetes scaling patterns for CI workloads, including multi-cluster strategies, predictive node provisioning, and handling API throttling

  • Performance optimization techniques like Git mirroring, node-level caching, and spot instance management for variable CI demands

  • Migration strategies and lessons learned from moving away from monolithic CI, including proof-of-concept approaches and avoiding the sunk cost fallacy

Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by Testkube—where teams run millions of performance tests in real Kubernetes infrastructure. From air-gapped environments to massive scale deployments, orchestrate every testing tool in one platform. Check it out at testkube.io

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Scaling CI horizontally with Buildkite, Kubernetes, and multiple pipelines, with Ben Poland

Scaling CI horizontally with Buildkite, Kubernetes, and multiple pipelines, with Ben Poland