What is Conveyor CI
The Headless Control Plane for Building CI/CD Platforms
Conveyor CI is not a CI tool. It is a control plane for building CI systems. If Jenkins and GitHub Actions are “all-in-one” platforms, Conveyor CI is the orchestration engine underneath them minus the UI, minus opinionated runners, minus infrastructure lock-in. You don’t use Conveyor to run go build. You use Conveyor to build a system that runs go build for thousands of users.
Who Is This For?
Conveyor CI is built for platform engineers and SaaS builders, not end users. It is ideal for:
- Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) embedding CI/CD capabilities
- SaaS products offering “Deploy”, “Build”, or “Automation” features
- Edge & air-gapped environments requiring custom execution logic
- Organizations with strict security or infrastructure control needs
If you need complete control over where and how workloads execute, Conveyor is for you.
Architecture: Control Plane vs Execution
Conveyor CI enforces a strict architectural boundary.
| Component | Responsibility | Provided By |
|---|---|---|
| Control Plane | Job lifecycle management, state persistence, queuing, retries, log aggregation, APIs | Conveyor CI |
| SDK | Typed interface for interacting with the engine | Conveyor CI |
| Drivers (Execution Logic) | The code that actually runs workloads | You |
Conveyor does not ship Drivers, you define execution. This separation gives you, Infrastructure independence, Security model control, Hardware flexibility, Multi-environment support.
Core Capabilities
Conveyor CI provides the orchestration primitives required to build serious CI systems:
- Job Lifecycle Management: creation, scheduling, retries, cancellation.
- State Persistence: durable workflow state tracking
- Event-Driven Execution: reactive architecture for scaling systems.
- Real-Time Log Streaming: aggregated and streamed logs.
- Declarative Workflows: define pipelines as structured configurations.
- API-First Design: fully accessible via HTTP.
- Embeddable Runtime: small Go binary, minimal resource footprint.
No UI. No opinionated runners. No vendor lock-in.
Just orchestration.
Why This Design?
Most CI/CD platforms bundle UI, Execution environment, Orchestration logic, Storage, Scheduling, Opinionated infrastructure assumptions. Conveyor extracts the orchestration layer and leaves execution to you. This enables:
- Running on edge devices
- Air-gapped military networks
- Custom hardware
- Multi-cloud abstraction
- Fully white-labeled CI platforms
It’s the missing middle layer between Infrastructure and Developer-facing CI platforms.
Example Use Case
You are building an Internal Developer Platform.
You want:
- Teams to push code
- Pipelines to trigger
- Jobs to execute inside Kubernetes
- Logs to stream back to your web dashboard
With Conveyor:
- Conveyor handles orchestration, state, and events.
- Your Kubernetes driver handles execution.
- Your UI consumes Conveyor’s API.
Clean separation. Clear ownership.
To install Conveyor CI, checkout the Installation Page