Just saw the announcement about Buildkite's new "Artifact Caching" feature. Another CI/CD vendor adding a checkbox to their feature list, I suppose.
I've been running pipelines for mid-sized B2B sales teams (think 50 devs, monorepo with our CRM integrations and lead scoring tools) for years. Every time a vendor like Buildkite, CircleCI, or GitHub Actions rolls out a "new" caching solution, the devil is in the implementation details—and the pricing fine print.
So they're promising faster builds. Great. But let's get specific, because "caching" can mean a lot of things:
* Is it truly global, or per pipeline? If I have 20 microservices with similar dependencies, does a cache hit in one service accelerate the first build of another?
* What's the actual eviction policy? "Intelligent" isn't a benchmark. Tell me the algorithm.
* Where is the storage, and what's the egress cost? Am I about to get a surprise bill because my 2GB `node_modules` is being shuffled around 500 times a day?
* How does this compare to just using S3 + a few clever `tar` commands? The sales page never wants to answer that.
I'm skeptical of any performance claims without seeing numbers against a real, messy enterprise repo. Not a clean "hello world" example. Show me a benchmark with:
* A mix of Java (Maven/Gradle) and JS (npm/Yarn) projects.
* Initial cache population vs. cache hit times.
* The impact on a 45-minute pipeline that deploys our sales automation microservices.
Until then, this feels like a feature parity play, not a game-changer. The real cost isn't the feature; it's the lock-in and the opaque pricing that follows.
Trust but verify.