Learn

Partners and consultants implementing Buildkite for customers — What changes when the organisation is not yours and you will eventually leave it.

Anyone who owns build times, on either side of the platform line — The changes that actually reduce wall-clock time, and how to tell which constraint you have before changing anything.

Developers writing their first pipelines — Enough to write a correct pipeline and read a failing build, without touching anything about running the platform.

Security and compliance reviewers, who will never write a pipeline — What the controls are, what each one actually guarantees, and the questions worth asking of an existing organisation.

Platform and CI engineers who own the Buildkite estate — Topology, security, access and diagnosis — the full Platform Engineer track in order.

The step types Buildkite gives you, and why the order of a file is not the shape of a build.

Writing pipelines

Counts toward: Buildkite Pipeline Author (required) · Buildkite Platform Engineer (recommended)

Keys, depends_on, conditionals, and telling a broken step apart from a failed one.

Writing pipelines · Build speed

Counts toward: Buildkite Pipeline Author (required) · Buildkite Platform Engineer (recommended)

Generating steps at build time, uploading them, and passing values between steps.

Writing pipelines · Build speed

Counts toward: Buildkite Pipeline Author (required) · Buildkite Platform Engineer (recommended)

Getting files out of a job, and into the next one.

Writing pipelines

Counts toward: Buildkite Pipeline Author (required) · Buildkite Platform Engineer (recommended)

Retries that are worth having, soft failures, and stopping a doomed build early.

Writing pipelines · Build speed

Counts toward: Buildkite Pipeline Author (required) · Buildkite Platform Engineer (recommended)

Limiting how many jobs run at once, and why that is not the same as capacity.

Writing pipelines · Capacity and cost

Counts toward: Buildkite Pipeline Author (required) · Buildkite Platform Engineer (recommended)

The cluster → queue → agent hierarchy, and how a step ends up on the machine you intended.

Capacity and cost · Migrating to Buildkite

Counts toward: Buildkite Platform Engineer (required)

Keeping credentials out of pipelines, and constraining what a job is allowed to load.

Security and governance

Counts toward: Buildkite Platform Engineer (required)

Telling a capacity problem apart from a gate, a gate apart from a person, and knowing which one you actually have.

Build speed · Capacity and cost

Counts toward: Buildkite Platform Engineer (required)

Who can change what, who did change what, and the risks that arrive from outside the organisation.

Security and governance

Counts toward: Buildkite Platform Engineer (required)

What transfers between customer implementations, what must be rebuilt, and how to standardise without hard-coding one customer's assumptions.

Delivery and handover · Migrating to Buildkite

Counts toward: Buildkite Partner Implementer (required)

Leaving an implementation the customer's own team can operate, extend and debug without you.

Delivery and handover

Counts toward: Buildkite Partner Implementer (required)