The New Stack Podcast

CircleCI's Technical Architecture is Built for Scalability

Episode Summary

Like a lot of startups, CircleCI started with a monolith, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). But there was only so much that could be done to keep the monolith performing when by 2015 the company started to scale. CircleCI had built its own job scheduler in 2011 because there was nothing on the market that matched what they needed. On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder Alex Williams caught up with CircleCI's CTO Rob Zuber in a live-streamed discussion to dig deeper into the architecture workings behind the organization.  By 2015, the company had made a conscious decision to use third=party tools instead of building their own, including Kubernetes, Docker containers, AWS, and Nomad. In managing Kuberenetes on AWS, Zuber noted that CircleCI has faced some issues as Kubernetes is not officially supported by AWS, but that the overall experience has been positive. “In terms of managing our own infrastructure, what mattered to us was the ecosystem. Kubernetes is a scheduler, but with it are all of these tools people have built to help us do our job. It was becoming pretty clear Kubernetes was a leader in terms of the amount of support it was getting.” Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNoB6gohAY8

Episode Notes

Like a lot of startups, CircleCI started with a monolith, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). But there was only so much that could be done to keep the monolith performing when by 2015 the company started to scale. CircleCI had built its own job scheduler in 2011 because there was nothing on the market that matched what they needed. On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder Alex Williams caught up with CircleCI's CTO Rob Zuber in a live-streamed discussion to dig deeper into the architecture workings behind the organization. 

By 2015, the company had made a conscious decision to use third=party tools instead of building their own, including Kubernetes, Docker containers, AWS, and Nomad. In managing Kuberenetes on AWS, Zuber noted that CircleCI has faced some issues as Kubernetes is not officially supported by AWS, but that the overall experience has been positive.

“In terms of managing our own infrastructure, what mattered to us was the ecosystem. Kubernetes is a scheduler, but with it are all of these tools people have built to help us do our job. It was becoming pretty clear Kubernetes was a leader in terms of the amount of support it was getting.”

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNoB6gohAY8