TLDR Tech / Dev
Shipyard: How We Built Slack's Next-Generation EC2 Platform
Shipyard is a next-generation EC2 platform that replaces the old model of continuously patching long-lived instances with immutable, deployable artifacts, bringing modern practices like progressive rollouts and automated rollback directly to EC2 workloads that can't move to containers. It's built on a hardened “golden” base image (slack-zero) that service teams layer their own AMIs on top of, with a heavy bake phase and lightweight boot-time provisioning so instances start fast and fleets update through replacement rather than in-place changes.
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