Company
Date Published
Author
Christian Nunciato
Word count
2125
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Monorepos and Jenkins are commonly used in software projects to organize code and manage continuous integration (CI) processes due to their collaborative potential and open-source nature, respectively. However, as projects and teams scale, the limitations of Jenkins become apparent, particularly in handling the complexity of large monorepos, which leads to increased build times, system crashes, and a need for extensive infrastructure. Teams often resort to workarounds to manage these challenges, such as adding more Jenkins controllers and custom tooling, but these solutions primarily address concurrency issues without enhancing the flexibility and control over pipeline dynamics. Successful teams eventually shift towards software-driven pipelines, using modern programming languages to redefine pipeline logic, which allows for dynamic, programmatic control and greater efficiency. This transition is exemplified by companies like Uber, which have adopted solutions like Buildkite to manage their large-scale monorepos with dynamic pipelines, offering unlimited concurrency and scalable control planes, thus overcoming the inherent limitations of Jenkins.