June 2024 Summaries

Uber faced challenges in reducing monorepo build times and providing flexible, scalable Continuous Integration (CI) for thousands of developers. They launched a Go monorepo using the open-source build system Make in combination with Go's go build. Later, they upgraded to Google's Bazel, which allowed them to optimize their CI workflows by understanding how each target is built and how they relate to each other. By 2022, Uber's Go monorepo was the largest code repository at Uber with over 50 million lines of code, 500,000 files, and 3,000 engineers working on it. To support safe and fast changes, they built a system called SubmitQueue to keep the main branch green while landing thousands of commits per day. They also replaced Jenkins with Buildkite for dynamic CI, which allowed them to define their builds dynamically using scripts from their source code. This led to significant improvements in developer happiness and productivity, as well as better visibility into build events and metrics.

Generative AI is transforming code development, with tools like GitHub's Copilot significantly increasing the volume and speed of code creation, creating challenges for traditional CI/CD systems like Jenkins. Many companies, including Airbnb, Slack, and Uber, have moved from Jenkins to Buildkite Pipelines, citing issues with Jenkins' scalability, plugin management, and outdated user interface. Jenkins struggles to manage the increasing demands of modern software development due to its architectural limitations, scale issues, and plugin-related vulnerabilities. Buildkite offers a robust alternative that supports AI-assisted workloads with virtually unlimited scaling, dynamic pipelines, and enhanced security features, making it an attractive option for teams facing the productivity and maintenance challenges associated with Jenkins. The shift is driven by the need for tools that accommodate the rapid pace and increased volume of code changes in the GenAI era, emphasizing the importance of having a CI/CD platform that keeps developers productive and satisfied.