Buildkite Pipeline Patterns#

Buildkite splits CI/CD into two parts: a hosted web service that manages pipelines, builds, and the UI, and self-hosted agents that execute the actual work. This architecture means your code, secrets, and build artifacts never touch Buildkite’s infrastructure. The agents run on your machines – EC2 instances, Kubernetes pods, bare metal, laptops.

Why Teams Choose Buildkite#

The question usually comes up against Jenkins and GitHub Actions.

Over Jenkins: Buildkite eliminates the Jenkins controller as a single point of failure. There is no plugin compatibility hell, no Groovy DSL, no Java memory tuning. Agents are stateless binaries that poll for work. Scaling is adding more agents. Jenkins requires careful capacity planning of the controller itself.

What Backstage Provides#

Backstage is an open-source developer portal originally built by Spotify, now a CNCF Incubating project. It serves as the single UI layer for an internal developer platform, unifying the service catalog, documentation, scaffolding templates, and plugin-based integrations behind one interface. It does not replace your tools — it provides a consistent frontend for discovering and interacting with them.

The core components:

• Software Catalog: A registry of all services, libraries, APIs, and infrastructure components, populated from YAML descriptor files in your repositories.
• TechDocs: Documentation-as-code powered by MkDocs, rendered directly in the Backstage UI alongside the service it describes.
• Scaffolder: A template engine that creates new projects from predefined templates — repositories, CI pipelines, Kubernetes manifests, and all.
• Plugins: Backstage’s extension mechanism. The community provides plugins for Kubernetes, ArgoCD, PagerDuty, GitHub Actions, Terraform, and hundreds of other tools.

Installation#

Backstage requires Node.js 18+ and Yarn. Create a new Backstage app: