Ben Poland, Senior Staff Platform Engineer @ Faire, breaks down the fundamental architectural differences between Jenkins and Buildkite when running CI workloads on Kubernetes.

He explains how Jenkins controllers handle the control plane (UI, pipeline parsing, work distribution) and pod management through the Kubernetes plugin, creating a bottleneck that limits scalability to around 1,500-2,000 pods per controller.

In contrast, Buildkite separates the control plane by hosting it themselves, while Faire runs only the agent stack component in their Kubernetes infrastructure.

Watch the full episode: https://ku.bz/klBmzMY5-