Skip to content

SYSTEM Cited by 1 source

Slack Shipyard

What it is

Shipyard is the brand-new EC2 ecosystem Slack is building as a successor to the legacy Chef-based EC2 platform, designed specifically for teams that can't yet move to the container-based platform Bedrock. Announced in the 2025-10-23 phase-2 Chef post.

This wiki stub exists to anchor Shipyard as the named platform-engineering roadmap item; the actual Shipyard post has not yet been published (and therefore not ingested).

Named design goals

From the phase-2 Chef post (verbatim):

"Shipyard isn't just an iteration of our old system — it's a complete reimagining of how EC2-based services should work. It introduces concepts like service-level deployments, metric-driven rollouts, and fully automated rollbacks when things go wrong."

Three load-bearing goals:

  1. Service-level deployments — per-service isolation. The post explicitly names this as the architectural ceiling of the legacy Chef-based platform: "In theory, we could create a dedicated set of Chef environments for each service and promote artifacts individually — but with the hundreds of services we operate at Slack, this quickly becomes unmanageable at scale." Shipyard is built to lift that ceiling.
  2. Metric-driven rollouts — Shipyard rollouts will be gated on production metrics, mirroring the discipline already established in ReleaseBot on Webapp backend and extended in the Deploy Safety Program.
  3. Fully automated rollbacks — automatic rollback on metric-regression detection, consistent with the Deploy Safety Program's 10-minute auto-remediate North Star (see patterns/automated-detect-remediate-within-10-minutes).

Rollout plan (as of 2025-10-23)

  • Soft launch: Q4 2025 ("this quarter" at post's publish date 2025-10-23).
  • First two teams onboarded for testing and feedback.
  • The dedicated Shipyard blog post is promised by the same author: "I'm excited to share more about Shipyard in my next blog post — stay tuned!"

Relationship to existing Slack compute stack

                    ┌─────────────────────────────┐
                    │ Slack Deploy Safety Program │
                    │ (10m auto / 20m manual SLOs)│
                    └──────────────┬──────────────┘
                                   │
                ┌──────────────────┼──────────────────┐
                │                  │                  │
                ▼                  ▼                  ▼
          ┌───────────┐      ┌──────────┐       ┌──────────┐
          │ Slack     │      │ Shipyard │       │ legacy   │
          │ Bedrock   │      │ (new EC2)│       │ Chef EC2 │
          │ (K8s PaaS)│      │ upcoming │       │ feat-    │
          │ preferred │      │ EC2-only │       │ complete │
          └───────────┘      └──────────┘       └──────────┘
  • Bedrock remains the preferred target for containerisable workloads.
  • Shipyard is the "escape valve" for EC2-only workloads (hardware-tied, IP-pinned, deep-init, non-containerisable).
  • Legacy Chef-based EC2 is feature-complete + maintenance- mode; phase 2 of the Chef work (AZ-bucketed environments + Chef Summoner) is the final architectural investment there.

Why this page is a stub

  • Shipyard itself has not yet launched publicly (soft launch Q4 2025 with two pilot teams).
  • No dedicated blog post exists yet.
  • Internal architecture, mechanism, and implementation are undisclosed.

Open questions

  • Is Shipyard built on Kubernetes, ECS, Nomad, or a custom substrate? The post does not disclose.
  • Does Shipyard wrap Chef for per-node config, or replace Chef entirely with a different config primitive? Undisclosed.
  • Is the Shipyard-equivalent of ReleaseBot a per-service orchestrator, or does Shipyard feed the centralised deployment orchestration system? Undisclosed.
  • What is the migration path from legacy Chef-based EC2 to Shipyard? Undisclosed.

Caveats

  • Stub-level. Zero mechanism content; this page exists to anchor the name and roadmap direction.
  • Not yet launched. Soft-launched with two pilot teams as of 2025-10-23; not yet available to all Slack engineering.
  • Subject to revision. Anything in the "next blog post" is not yet on the wiki record; this page will need an update when the Shipyard post is published.

Seen in

Last updated · 470 distilled / 1,213 read