Parallel builds

Running a build's steps in parallel is a way to decrease your build's total running time. This guide will show you how to use multiple agents and job parallelism to increase the speed of your builds.

Command steps run in parallel by default. If you define multiple steps, and run multiple agents, the steps will run at the same time across your agents.

If you don't want your steps to run at the same time, you can add wait steps or use dependencies. For example, you could have a test step and a deploy step, with a wait step in between.

A single command step can also be broken up into many parallel jobs. For example, a long-running test suite can be split into many parallel pieces across multiple agents, reducing the total run time of your build.

Running multiple agents

There are two ways to scale your build agents: horizontally across multiple machines, or vertically on a single machine. You can even run many agents per machine across many machines.

Multiple agents on one machine

The steps for running multiple agents are slightly different for each platform. Automated installers and detailed instructions can be found in the installation section. But the simplest example is to use the spawn option when starting the agent:

# After running the standard install instructions...

# Start five agents
buildkite-agent start --spawn 5

This will start a single process, but can run up to 5 different jobs at the same time.

The start command can also be run multiple times with different configurations. For example, to change the queue:

buildkite-agent start --tags queue=test

# In another window, or tab
buildkite-agent start --tags queue=deploy

Multiple agents on many machines

The secret to fast builds is running as many build agents as you can. The best way to do that is to have many machines running build agents. These machines can be anything ranging from your laptop, a few spare computers in your office, to a fleet of thousands of cloud compute instances.

The Buildkite agent should run on any hardware and any cloud compute provider. It is built to be flexible, and can be composed in any way that suits the platform, infrastructure, or workload. The installation instructions demonstrate how to run the Buildkite agent across various platforms.

For example, you could start several Google Cloud Compute instances, then install and start build agents. These instructions can be automated using infrastructure as code tools like Terraform, and then add auto-scaling rules so you always have enough capacity.

The Elastic CI Stack for AWS provides a pre-built CloudFormation Stack for AWS that runs multiple auto-scaling agents.

Parallel jobs

parallelism is an attribute on a single command step which causes it to be split into many jobs. Those jobs will be the same except for having a parallel index and count. They share the same dependencies and agent tags.

To run the same step in parallel over all 5 of the agents, we can set the parallelism field for a single build step:

pipeline.yml
steps:
  - command: "tests.sh"
    parallelism: 5

Update the name of the step to include %n, like the example below. This will include a number at runtime so that you can differentiate between the parallel build jobs.

pipeline.yml
steps:
  - command: "tests.sh"
    label: "Test %n"
    parallelism: 5

You can choose from the following parallel job index label helpers:

  • %n to display job count starting at 0.
  • %N to display job count starting at 1.
  • %t to display the total number of parallel jobs in the step.

Now that the pipeline is configured, create a new build:

The build

If you inspect the first job's environment variables you'll find:

BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB=0
BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB_COUNT=5

The BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB environment variable stores the index of each parallel job created from a parallel build step, starting from 0. For a build step with parallelism: 5, the value would be 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively.

The BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB_COUNT environment variable stores the total number of jobs created from this step for this build.

You can use these two environment variables to divide your application's tests between the different jobs.

Libraries

The following libraries have built-in support the BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB and BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB_COUNT environment variables:

  • Knapsack
    Knapsack is a ruby gem for automatically dividing your tests between parallel jobs, as well as making sure each job runs in comparable time. It supports RSpec, Cucumber, and minitest.

  • Knapsack Pro
    A commercially supported version of Knapsack that provides a hosted service for test timing data and additional job distribution modes for Ruby, JavaScript, and more. See the documentation and step-by-step tutorial for Ruby setup instructions and example pipelines. For other programming languages please check integrations.

  • Shardy McShardFace
    Shardy McShardFace is an npm package for dividing your tests between parallel jobs. it shards as evenly as possible, uneven splits will end up in the tail shards, supports sharding fewer items than the parallelism count, and distributes items into shards based on a given seed for a random number generator to provide random, but stable distribution. See the documentation.

Isolated jobs

You can safely run multiple build jobs on a single machine, as the agent runs each build in its own checkout directory. You'll still need to ensure your application supports running in parallel on the same machine, and doesn't try to write to any shared resources at the same time (such as modifying the same database at the same time).

One convenient way of achieving build job isolation is to use the agent's built in Docker Compose support which will run each job inside a set of completely isolated Docker containers.

Auto-scaling your build agents

In addition to the Elastic CI Stack for AWS (which has built-in support for auto-scaling) we provide a number of APIs and tools you can use to auto-scale your own build agents:

  • GraphQL API allows you to efficiently fetch your organization's scheduled jobs count, agents count, and details about each agent.
  • Pipelines REST API and Agents API you're able to fetch each pipeline's job count, and information about each agent.
  • Agent priorities allow you to define which agents are assigned work first, such as high performance ephemeral agents.
  • Agent queues allow you to divide your agent pools into separate groups for scaling and performance purposes.
  • buildkite-agent-metrics tool allow you to collect your organization's Buildkite metrics and report them to AWS CloudWatch and StatsD.

Using these tools you can automate your build infrastructure, scale your agents based on demand, and massively reduce build times using job parallelism.