Continuous Integration for Monorepos

The shift towards microservices and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has brought about a re-evaluation of existing practices, including the use of monorepos. While some organizations have moved away from monorepos in favor of decentralized approaches inspired by microservices, others continue to find value in maintaining a unified codebase for various reasons such as cohesive version control and streamlined workflows. The debate between monorepos and multi-repos has become central to the discussion around Continuous Integration (CI) strategies. Monorepos offer several advantages, including standardization, greater visibility, and easier refactoring. However, they also come with challenges such as security considerations, dependency management, and managing project size. To plan CI for a monorepo, organizations should design a build strategy that focuses on efficiency and scalability, create a dependency management plan, and develop a build scalability plan. Additionally, templatizing builds can foster consistency, efficiency, and quality across the entire development process. Monitoring is crucial to maintaining efficient and effective CI processes in monorepos. Key metrics to monitor include build times, build failures, number of pending jobs, resource utilization, and feedback loop duration. Automated alerts and dashboards can provide real-time insights into CI performance. Buildkite has emerged as a preferred choice for continuous integration among many leading software companies due to its flexibility, scalability, and control over build environments. Its dynamic pipelines, plugins, branch filtering & limiting controls, and agent hooks make it an ideal solution for working with monorepos and other complex development workflows.