Bazel orchestration
Bazel at maximum velocity
Realize the full potential of your Bazel investment. World-class teams standardize on Buildkite to remove CI/CD bottlenecks and unleash Bazel at unlimited scale.
The world’s most demanding and sophisticated software companies have standardized on Buildkite and Bazel.
The problem
Platform engineering teams adopt Bazel to accelerate software delivery as their multi-language monorepos grow. But they quickly discover a new bottleneck—legacy CI/CD systems that can’t take advantage of Bazel’s dynamic nature, preventing teams from realizing Bazel’s full speed and efficiency.
The solution
Buildkite enables you to realize Bazel’s full potential through adaptable pipelines that respond dynamically to build events. This accelerates your entire software delivery process while making complex pipelines straightforward to create and maintain—no matter how large your engineering organization grows.
Proven performance
How Buildkite unleashes Bazel
Large-scale development with complex dependencies, big teams, and diverse programming languages: this is precisely the environment both Bazel and Buildkite have excelled in.
Together, Buildkite and Bazel remove the bottlenecks that prevent teams from delivering at speed.
Accelerate builds with reactive workflows
Create dynamic pipelines that adapt in real time to Bazel’s dependency analysis and event stream—letting you optimize every build to fit evolving requirements.
Express complex build logic in code
Use your preferred programming language instead of wrestling with static YAML files, unlocking sophisticated workflows to optimize your builds.
Scale concurrency without limits
Leverage Buildkite’s architecture to handle massive parallelization across your entire delivery pipeline—efficiently distributing compute to reduce build times.
Optimize infrastructure dynamically based on workload needs
Programatically route specialized workloads to their ideal infrastructure—assign ML builds to GPU instances, iOS builds to Mac hardware, and web services to Linux machines. Maintain persistent agents with access to the right Bazel cache.
Maintain stability at any scale
Let Buildkite manage the control plane, allowing your infrastructure to grow without the operational nightmare of complex upgrades or availability issues.
Transform platform engineering from maintenance to enablement
Replace brittle, handcrafted configurations with programmable pipelines that scale across hundreds of teams and workflows.
Create consistent guardrails with flexible self-service
Establish golden paths that allow teams to customize within boundaries to ensure organisational consistency while removing the platform team as a bottleneck to delivery.
Powering platform engineering
What you can do with Buildkite and Bazel
Create dynamic pipelines that respond to Bazel’s analysis
Match workloads to specialized compute
Dynamically allocate optimal hardware for each job based on Bazel’s dependency analysis—ML training to GPU agents, iOS to Mac hardware, and services to Linux—while maintaining a unified pipeline experience.
iOS CPU aarch64Generate and adapt your pipeline in real time
Use Bazel's dependency graph and event streams to shape your pipeline at runtime. Instantly spawn customized pipelines with the right configuration and the optimal steps for each team, environment, or deploy—without brittle YAML.
Run smarter, faster test suites
Maximize test feedback efficiency by combining Bazel's build graph analysis with Buildkite Test Engine's flaky test detection. Screen out problematic tests to run only what's needed for each build.
Create interactive build interfaces powered by Bazel data
Surface custom Bazel insights
Extend your build interface with Buildkite annotations and transform Bazel’s build event protocol data into actionable intelligence. Increase developer productivity by surfacing precisely what matters in the build UI.
Bazel Results Leverage Buildkite’s built-in visualizations
The Buildkite interface automatically transforms complex Bazel builds into a clear software delivery interface, helping teams quickly identify and resolve issues without parsing logs manually.
Key features
Dynamic pipelines let you customize pipeline steps on the fly to reduce run times and react to changing scenarios—from adding new steps to triggering different pipelines based information from Bazel. All with logic you write in your programming language of choice.
Flexible workflow primitives give you a toolkit of building blocks to tailor pipelines to your needs. Combine specialized step types (such as wait, input, and block), agent hooks that extend agent behavior at lifecycle stages, and webhooks that integrate Buildkite into your systems to craft expressive pipelines.
Monorepo builds selectively build parts of your codebase depending on what changed. Use our official plugin, or combine Bazel’s query capabilities with dynamic pipelines to implement your own build and test selection strategy.
Built by developers, for developers
- SOC 2 Type II compliant.
- Audit logs.
- Multi-level permissions to control access.
- REST and GraphQL APIs.
- SSO, SAML, and 2FA.
Customers
Teams work better with Buildkite
19 minutes
How Bazel built its CI system on Buildkite
Learn how Bazel built its CI to enable faster, more reliable builds at scale.
Philipp Wollermann
Frequently asked questions
Got a question that’s not on our list? Want a demo? Just want to chat? Get in touch.
No, you set your own limits with self-hosted agents. Buildkite handles upwards of 100,000 concurrent agents from some customers.
Buildkite provides an SLA of 99.95% uptime and a status page to track any incidents.
Migration times depend on the number and complexity of your pipelines. We recommend derisking migrations by breaking them into milestones and choosing a key pipeline to start with. Many teams start with the most critical or expensive pipeline or a new project. They then establish paved roads to help other teams move to Buildkite.
Buildkite also offers professional services to support your migrations. Contact support to learn more.
Yes! All new organizations get a 30-day free trial of the Pro plan to try the key features. See Pricing for all the details on the plans.
No, Buildkite cannot be fully self-hosted. While you can run the build infrastructure on self-hosted agents, the control plane is a SaaS offering managed by Buildkite.
This setup eliminates the overhead of maintaining and scaling the control plane, allowing your team to focus on delivering quality code quickly and efficiently. Self-hosted agents provide many benefits of an on-premises deployment with security, compliance, and governance controls.
Yes, Buildkite supports lightweight plugins to integrate with popular tools, but with significant improvements over Jenkins. Unlike Jenkins plugins, Buildkite only executes plugins on agents, ensuring the control plane remains stable and secure.
This approach prevents crashes and reduces downtime. Teams can also use multiple versions of a plugin without impacting each other.
Resources
Guides to improve your practices
Start turning complexity into an advantage
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