Case Study: Elastic achieves 70% faster CI/CD runs with Buildkite

Elastic cuts Kibana CI/CD run time by 70% with Buildkite

Elastic, the Search AI Company, faced significant challenges with its legacy CI/CD system, which could not scale to meet the demands of its growing engineering teams. Their pipeline run times were excessively long, and the lack of a developer-friendly interface created cross-team dependencies and hindered productivity. To solve this, Elastic turned to the vendor Buildkite and its Buildkite Pipelines service to find a more flexible and scalable platform.

By implementing Buildkite, Elastic leveraged features like dynamic pipelines and unlimited concurrency to massively parallelize its testing. This allowed them to drastically reduce their Kibana CI/CD pipeline execution time from 3 hours to just 55 minutes. The solution from Buildkite also cut cloud infrastructure costs by nearly three quarters and transformed the CI system from the least-liked to the most-liked by developers, greatly improving productivity and enabling faster innovation.

Elastic