BuildRock: A Build Platform at Slack

This post introduces 'BuildRock', a new build platform at Slack designed to address technical debt and scale issues with the existing Jenkins-based system. It details the migration to a stateless, immutable CI service running on Kubernetes, leveraging ephemeral and static agents. The post also covers the integration of SecOps into the build pipeline through vulnerability scanning, IAM, and RBAC policies. It highlights a shift-left approach with testing in blanket test clusters and pre-staging areas. Standardization is achieved through the Jenkins Configuration-as-Code (casc) plugin and centralized plugin management. State management uses EFS with automated backups and rollback. GitOps principles are enforced for infrastructure operations, with Jinja2 used for templating. Metrics, logging, and tracing are enabled using Prometheus, ELK, and Honeycomb. Service owners have control over build and deploy actions. The post also discusses a distributed ownership model where service teams manage their own systems on the platform.