We have reduced agent timeouts from 5 minutes to just 3 minutes, and improved the lost agent cleanup service from 5 minutes to 1 minute! This enhancement offers significant benefits to our customers, particularly those utilizing spot instances for their agents.

With shorter timeouts, jobs now fail faster when spot instances can't compete on price, slashing the time it takes for pipelines to detect and recover from failures from 10 minutes to just 4 minutes. This means faster feedback loops, streamlined pipelines, and ultimately, accelerated development cycles.

Learn more about it

Today, we updated our REST API rate limits. ​This update will improve performance, enhance security, and ensure fair usage.

For more information on rate limits please consult our documentation.

• Creating a new landing page for Pipelines. This helps distinguish the product from the feature and provides clearer entry points for new users.
• Adding a dedicated page to describe Pipelines' hybrid architecture.
• Highlighting H3s when scrolling on a page.
• Splitting the GraphQL cookbook into multiple pages to make it easier to navigate.
• Updating the search component.
• Applying general style updates across the site, from typography and tables to page layout and spacing.

And many more small changes. See the documentation to check them all out. ✨

Pipeline edit permissions are now required to view pipeline.provider.webhook_url. If the user does not have the correct permissions, a blank string will be shown in place of the webhook URL.

This change will also affect webhook payloads containing pipeline data. To ensure the greatest level of security, pipeline.provider.webhook_url will no longer be visible in these payloads.

Read more about the REST API

Starting today, newly created API Access Tokens will only access one organization. This update aims to enhance organizations' security by simplifying access token management. Administrators should be aware that tokens cannot be modified to include their organization after they have been originally created.

This change only affects newly created tokens. All existing tokens will remain unaffected by this change; however, existing tokens will not be able to add any additional organizations to their scope.

Buildkite has introduced new rate limits for the GraphQL API.

This update will improve performance, enhance security, and ensure fair usage across the Buildkite platform.

Please read the documentation to learn more about the GraphQL rate limits, specifically how to check your current usage:

• Check time-based limits
• View query complexity

Effective from 24 July 2023, agent tokens in the Buildkite UI will undergo a significant modification. They will now behave similarly to API tokens, meaning that after creation, they will no longer be visible in the UI.

To ensure you have access to the complete token, it is crucial to save it immediately upon creation. This change aims to enhance the security of agent tokens within the Buildkite platform.

Please make a note of this update and adjust your workflows accordingly. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to our support team (support@buildkite.com) for assistance.

Buildkite has implemented additional security notifications to keep your data safer.

Security notifications empower customers to promptly address any token changes made to their accounts, ensuring data security and preventing unauthorised access.

Users will now receive an email when they create or update an access token associated with their account.

We're removing support for Import of agent tokens in the Terraform provider. This change coincides with the announcement in this changelog. From 4 July 2023 onwards, any resources or data-sources which are dependent on an agent token being present will likely fail to apply.

We recommend that you update your provider version to >=0.19.0. Any version below this will run a state refresh on the next Terraform operation and cause agent tokens in state to be set to nil, "". If these changes are then deployed, there is a risk that all agents in your organisation will have their tokens removed and no longer be able to connect to Buildkite.

Go to the v0.19.0 release

Go to the terraform registry

We've introduced a new 🔒 Security section under Settings for all security related features.

Moving all security related controls into the same space will make them easier to find and manage.

You'll find:

• Security contact
• Permissions settings
• Pipelines permissions
• Test Analytics permissions
• API access allowlist

consolidated in this new page: https://buildkite.com/organizations/~/security

We've redesigned the documentation home page to make getting to the content you want easier.

Notice:

• A clearer path to get started for new users.
• Quick access to popular content for everyone.
• Links to look up reference data for experienced users.
• A consistent global navigation to make jumping to the section you want easier.

See Buildkite docs to check it out! ✨

We've restructured the documentation for the Elastic CI Stack for AWS to create clearer and more focused pages that are easier to navigate.

See the Overview to check out the changes. ✨

We've just shipped new features that'll help uplevel your build and test workflows with Buildkite, including some key announcements:

• Kubernetes agent stack
• OpenID Connect (OIDC) support
• flaky test tracker for automatically detecting flaky tests

Learn more about what's new in our March 2023 release ✨

We've updated the Build UI to be more intuitive with the following improvements:

• The issues tab is called the failures tab, making it easier for you to view failed jobs
• The organization name and avatar are now seen on each Build page, to make it easier view the organization you're editing settings for
• Block steps within groups are now easier to identify in the UI with a thickened purple border
• Pipelines can be bookmarked instead of starred
• Build summary now has a rebuild option, rather than edit steps and new build options
• You can now navigate to all builds by clicking on the builds icon
• Spacing and font fixes

It's also easier to make your pipelines stand out with:

• Pipeline avatars in place of build stats
• Configuration of pipeline color and emoji through pipeline settings

The latest agent release includes the job-api experiment, which enables an HTTP API within the agent, allowing jobs to inspect and mutate their environment without using bash. This is a big step towards supporting hooks and plugins in other languages.

Other experimental features include:

• allowing spawning agents with a descending priority, rather than the default ascending priority
• artifacts can now be uploaded to S3 compatible endpoints such as MinIO.

Other updates to this release include:

• the AWS Elastic Stack has been updated with a newer version of buildx
• the managed secrets buckets created by the stack now have public ACLs explicitly blocked

For a full list of additions, changes, fixes, and more details, see the buildkite-agent changelog and the elastic-ci-stack-for-aws changelog on GitHub.

The 3.44.0 version of the buildkite-agent and the 5.17.0 version of the AWS elastic stack are now available.

Major updates to the agent include:

• New experiment for running jobs under Kubernetes
• Docker images based on Ubuntu 22.04
• The ability to add claims to OIDC token requests

This agent release has been added to the 5.17.0 release of the elastic stack, as well as support for c7gn, m7g, and r7g instance type classes, and updates to Docker, Docker Compose, buildx, git, and the Linux kernel.

For a full list of additions, changes, and fixes, see the buildkite-agent changelog and the elastic-ci-stack-for-aws changelog on GitHub.

Update: This change has now been completed.

Over the past two years, GitHub, GitLab, and other Git services have updated their default branch names from "master" to "main" – you can read more about the motivation for the change in this statement from the Software Freedom Conservancy.

In line with this change, we will be updating the default branch for newly created pipelines from "master" to "main" from April 1st, 2023. This will not impact existing pipelines.

You can configure a given pipeline's default branch through the user interface, as well as the REST API and GraphQL.

If you would like to retain "master" as the default branch of new pipelines, you may set an organization-level default branch in Pipeline Settings, which will then be used for new pipelines:

If you've ever thought "I need more purple in my life" then we've got some exciting news for you... 💜

We've made some changes to make navigation as simple and obvious as possible across all parts of the product. We've introduced a more familiar navigation pattern to Test Analytics, updated the global nav to clearly identify where you are in the app, and introduced a new visual style to the sidebar. It's a coat of paint, but also a foundation for the features and improvements you can expect in the coming months.

We're focused on the next-generation of Buildkite—from small improvements to whole new products and experience–so you can consider this just a taste of what's to come.

Read the full post

We've updated the navigation in the documentation to help you find the content you need quickly. 🎉

These changes include:

• Having the on-page navigation highlight which section you're reading.
• Revamping the style of the global navigation bar to a single row.
• Focusing on up-to-date and high-value pages like security while deemphasizing deprecated content.
• Highlighting the Overview page and Getting started guide for Pipelines.
• Updating the typography to improve readability.

Try out the new navigation

Pipelines now considers your current branch when surfacing options for a new build. This removes the friction of a new build defaulting to main.

This has been a highly-requested feature from our customers, and we’re so excited to share that the change is now live.