MIssing documentation: migrating unclustered agents to a cluster

[dmauas]

Our company has been using buildkite long before the clusters were introduced.
Our agents are all in AWS instances.
Now they are "unclustered".
Our pipelines are all "unclustered". But they work.

As a new employee, I was tasked with migrating our buildkite unclustered to a cluster.

However the lack of documentation regarding this process is preventing me from moving forward.

I am not sure where to begin, how to do this without affecting our daily work.
We cannot risk breaking all our pipeline simply to perform a migration which should have zero effects.
There are docs on all sorts of migrations, except this one.

This has led me to begin email correspondence with your support.

[gilesgas]

Hi there @dmauas , have you tried creating your relevant cluster(s), then moving your unclustered agents over to these clusters, and then moving your pipelines across to use the (now clustered) agents?

An agent connects to a Buildkite cluster via an agent token created from the cluster. Therefore, part of the migration process involves reconfiguring any agents running in your unclustered environment with agent tokens created from the relevant clusters you're migrating these agents to.

If you're concerned about disrupting your production pipelines, perhaps try creating a copy of a subset of any relevant pipelines and AWS agents you want to move over to a cluster first, then create a cluster and follow through with the processes I described at the top.

Also, if you're able to let us know what specific aspects of the documentation are unclear, please mention them here and we'll address them accordingly. For example, are these guidelines above too fragmented? Would they be better consolidated together? What's missing?