You may have noticed that things are looking ✨ around here, and it’s not just because it’s spring in the Southern Hemisphere 🌻
Today we’re excited to announce some big changes we’ve been working our hardest on: a new identity, new pricing, a new site, and new elastic build agents.
New Identity
If you’ve managed to sneak one of our new stickers you may have asked yourself “What on earth is that?”
Almost everyone who starts a new business or project tells themselves “I need a logo.” But more important than a logo is a visual identity – a system that embodies the nature of the project itself, something that invites you to take its components and play, explore and stretch your imagination just as you would a good set of programming tools.
The new Buildbox identity is made up of a logo, monogram, colours, typefaces and other visual devices, and you can see it all at play on the new site as well as in various IRL guises.
Here’s a video megagif showing the making of the main monogram:
The new stickers (gold foil!) which arrived 10 days ago:
And even a tote for the Melbourne office:
I can’t wait to see what else we dream up!
New Site
Along with a new visual identity, we have a new site.
It goes hand-in-hand with our new pricing structure (which I’ll explain below) and tries to focus on what people are using Buildbox most successfully for: automating all the things.
The documentation and guides have been refreshed and there’s a new about page which details the company, how to get free stickers, and gives us room to grow.
The new site also sets the stage to showcase some of the incredible build automation tooling some teams are building on top of Buildbox.
Rumour has it there’s even a secret ship-it squirrel somewhere amongst all that fancy SVG.
New Pricing
Simpler pricing, unlimited build agents.
Pricing is hard. So hard. Although we’ve had a number of changes to our pricing since launch, it all had the same structure: different tiers of plans, each with different limits to the number of projects, users, and agents.
After many conversations with existing and potential customers about what jobs Buildbox helps them to do, we’ve changed to a completely new pricing structure.
Buildbox is now US$15/user/month, with every account getting an unlimited number of build agents, projects and builds.
This means we no longer put any limit on the complexity and creativity of your build processes. Large team or solo developer, you can now create your ideal build automation workflow for one simple price. Parallelize and automate all the things!
We’ve also added an option to pay for the year in advance for a 15% discount.
New Agents
A new token registration system, Docker support, and Windows support.
A rewrite of our open-source Golang build agent and build coordination system has been in the works and is almost ready to go live. We’re calling it the “Elastic Agent” release.
Elastic agents enable you to spin up as many agents as you need using a single agent token. No longer will you have any excuse to have developers waiting for builds to finish (sorry, we know this is usually a good time to grab a coffee or go for a walk).
Envato are already using the new elastic agents to spin up new build machines during peak development time and then spin them down in the off-peak. And they’ve fed the metrics into AWS CloudWatch so it autoscales the build servers around those peaks.
Now you can take advantage of per-hour, cloud-based servers to improve the daily development cycle for everyone on your team.
We’ve also added built-in support for Docker and Fig so you can easily run your builds in complete isolation, drastically simplifying how easy it is to run a build server. If your project has a Dockerfile you can use that to run your builds, or with a fig.yml you can run your build within multiple linked containers. All the containers are namespaced to the build, which means one build could be using Postgres 9.3, and another Postgres 9.2, both running in parallel on the one machine.
To target specific agents in your build pipelines you can now tag agents with capabilities when they’re started, and then target these in your build pipeline steps using query rules. Have a group of Docker-enabled agents? Target them with docker=true. A Mac agent? xcode=true.
Elastic agents are in beta now (and available on GitHub). If you’d like access simply email support@buildkite.com and we’ll enable them for your account.
Buildboxchat Slack room
By popular request we’ve set up a Buildboxchat Slack room for teams from different companies to share build automation techniques.
Unfortunately due to the way Slack works we have to invite people one-by-one, but it’s by no means exclusive and we’d love to have you join us on there. Just let us know at support@buildkite.com and come and say hello!
Thanks!
Phew, that’s quite a bit 😅 Thanks to everyone who supported us with this release! 👏
