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 leads you through getting started with the stack 🎉

Launching the stack

Go to the Agents page on Buildkite and select the AWS tab:

Click Launch Stack

After clicking Next, configure the stack using your Buildkite agent token:

If you don't know your agent token, there is a Reveal Agent Token button available on the right-hand side of the Agents page:

By default the stack uses a job queue of default, but you can specify any other queue name you 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, Buildkite takes you 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 now have 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. Depending on your organization's settings, the next step will vary slightly:

• If your organization uses the web-based steps editor (default), your pipeline is now ready for its first build. You can skip to the next step.
• If your organization has been upgraded to the YAML steps editor, you should see a Choose a Starting Point wizard. Select Pipeline Upload from the list:
  

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 watch 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 they will 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 in our Elastic CI Stack for AWS docs. You can also view the GitHub repo.