No, Really, Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator
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Bash scripts are insufficient for large-scale CI systems because they lack orchestration, isolation, and observability. While bash works for simple linear workflows, it cannot handle complex requirements like parallel execution, resource management, dynamic dependencies, or proper failure handling. Without an orchestrator, builds share resources (filesystem, ports, memory) leading to race conditions, OOM kills affecting unrelated jobs, and non-reproducible failures. The article draws parallels to build system theory and language safety, arguing that CI at scale is a distributed systems problem requiring proper infrastructure like Buildkite, Dagger, or GitLab CI rather than hand-rolled shell scripts.
