I love BuildKite. It might seem obvious now but I feel like BK had two key ideas -- fully declarative pipelines and a hybrid SaaS control plane / customer-managed workers concept that made it so much easier to deploy into large enterprises. That combined with a UI that was clear and a pleasure to work with.

I do wonder how BK will continue in a world that's increasingly dominated by GitHub and and other integrated solutions, but I hope as long as there's a market for quality tools, BK will survive and thrive.

It also allowed us (a small startup) to run huge test suites, on cheap dedicated hardware from Hetzner, without sacrificing the developer experience.

It was the bill I was the happiest to pay.

We used Knapsack Pro to efficiently parallelise our Ruby test suite.

Today, I still use Buildkite, but now I build golden images (with packer) and deploy them with terraform.