Elastic CI Stack for AWS
The Elastic CI Stack for AWS gives you a private, autoscaling Buildkite Agent cluster in your own AWS account. This guide will lead you through getting started with the stack 
🎉
On this page:
Creating an AWS EC2 Key Pair
The first thing you’ll need is an EC2 Key Pair to allow you to SSH into EC2 instances created by the Elastic CI stack. If you already have a Key Pair that you'd like to use, you can head straight to Launching the Stack.
To create an EC2 Key Pair, sign into the AWS Management Console, click “Services ▼” on top left, then go to the EC2 service:
Then go to “Key Pairs” under “Network & Security”:
Click the “Create key pair” button in the top left hand corner and give it a name.
Launching the Stack
Go to the Agents page on Buildkite and select the “AWS” tab:
Click “Launch Stack” 
After clicking “Next” you’ll configure the stack using the details from Buildkite:
By default the stack uses a job queue of default but you can specify any other queue name you’d like. See the Buildkite Agent Job Queue docs for more info.
Review all configured options. Once you're ready, check both checkboxes:
- I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names.”_
- I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might require the following capability:
CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND
Then click “Create stack”:
After creating the stack, you'll be taken to the CloudFormation console. Click the “Refresh” icon in the top right hand corner of the screen until you see the stack status is CREATE_COMPLETE.
You've now got a working Elastic CI Stack ready to run builds! 🎉
Running your first build
We’ve created a sample bash-parallel-example sample pipeline for you to test with your new autoscaling stack. Click the “Add to Buildkite” button below (or on the GitHub Readme):
Click “Create Pipeline”. Your pipeline is now ready for its first build. Click "New Build" in the top right and choose a build message (perhaps a little party :partyparrot:?):
Once your build is created head back to AWS EC2 Auto Scaling Groups to monitor the Elastic CI Stack creating new EC2 instances:
Select the “buildkite-AgentAutoScaleGroup-xxxxxxxxxxxx” group and then the “Instances” tab. You'll see instances starting up to run your new build and after a few minutes they'll transition from Pending to InService:
Once the instances are ready you'll see them appear on your Buildkite Agents page:
And then your build will start running on your new agents:
Congratulations on running your first Elastic CI Stack build on Buildkite! 👏🎉
Further documentation
You can read more about the Elastic CI Stack over on the GitHub repository: